1
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
GE
235
.W18
E58
1994
ANACRU
ANACOSTIA MUSEUM
CONFERENCE
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND CONCERNS
EAST OF THE ANACOSTIA RIVER:
JUSTICE OR JUST US?
Saturday, June 18, 1994
The conference was held at the Allen Chapel
A.M.E. Church, 2498 Alabama Avenue, S.E., Washington,
D.C., at 9:00 a.m.
PRESENT:
THERESA ALEXANDER
KISHI ANIMASHAUN
DOROTHY ASHLEY
JAMES BANKS
JOANNA BANKS
FERIAL S. BISHOP
GOD BUIDIN
ROBERT BOONE
VENITA BOYD
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PRESENT
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(Continued):
PONCE BROWN
RACHELLE BROWNE
JAMES BUTLER
ROSS CAMPBELL
RONA CARTER
HERBERT CHAMBERS
ADDIE COOK
ZORA MARTIN FELTON
DOROTHEA FERRELL
DEEOHN FERRIS
MAURICE K. FOUSHEE
LIZ GILCRIST
ROBERT E. GULDIN
MARLUIN HALL
JIM HANNAHAN
HANNAH. M. HAWKINS
LOUVENIA HOLMES
GUSTAV JACKSON
DEBRA JONES
THERESA JONES
ABSOLON JORDAN
JULIA S. KERR
ROBERT J. KNOX
ALLISON M. KOLWAITE
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PRESENT
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(Continued):
GRAHAM KUSIMA
KWELISMITH
ADAORA LATHAN
ARNE LEONARD
LEON G. LIPSCOMB
DELLA LOWERY
LOUISE MADISON
JODEANE MARKS
TOM MARTIN
VERONICA MIDDLETON
LINDA MOODY
KEMI MORTEN
ELAINE C. MOSBY
ANTHONY MOTLEY
FRIEDA MURRAY
STEVEN NEWSOME
RETHO P. NOBLE
JAMES O'CONNOR
PHIL PANNELL
ROSA PINDERHUGHES
CHUCK D. RAMSEY
ROBERT RICHARDSON
JOE RODGERS
PAUL RUFFINS
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PRESENT
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(Continued):
RICK RYBECH
JEWELL SAUNDERS
ROGER SMALL
JEROME SMITH
SYDNEY SMITH
GERALDINE TWITTY
GROVER L. TYLER
EVAN VALLIANATOS
JULIA WASHBURN
PAULA WELCH
ADRIAN WHITE
DARRYL O. WHITE
JERALD L. WHITE
WILLIAM WINER
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CONTENTS
PAGE
Paul Ruffins
6
Rachelle V. Browne
45
James O'Connor
47
Geraldine Twitty
65
Ferial S. Bishop
72
Robert Knox
82
Deeohn Ferris
93
James Banks
108
Theresa Jones
119
Evan Vallianatos
122
Rev. Anthony Motley
134
Rona Carter
143
Robert Boone
147
Kemi Morten
159
Rev. Herbert Chambers
164
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PROCEEDINGS
(9:45 a.m.)
MR. RUFFINS: Thank you.
(Applause.)
MR. RUFFINS: I recognize some friends
here, people who I've seen at other places. I taught
a course in environmental racism at the Institute for
Policy Studies about five years ago, and what I'm
speaking on today is a very much continuation of the
work that I've done over the past five years, writing
about environmental justice and the political issues
involving the Afro-American community in environmental
justice.
If we start from a basic question, which is
to say in a society that is an unjust society, the
people who are at the bottom — in many cases we can
say at the bottom of the ecological food chain —
happen to be also the people who are exposed to the
highest concentrations of environmental hazards.
People have begun to notice now. This was an idea
that was beginning to be thought of in 1988 and '89,
but it's been articulated now. There's a variety of
good materials.
In terms of Washington, D.C., the
specifics, I'm not very much going to go into the
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specific technical things of pollution in Washington,
D.C. I know there are other people in this room who
are going to speak who know that better than I, but
I'd like to refer you to this document, "Our Unfair
Share, a Survey of Pollution Sources in our Nation's
Capitol." It was recently published by the African
American Environmentalists Association, which is
associated with the group I'm with, which is the
Center for Energy, Ecology and Community, the National
Association of Neighborhoods, and the National
Wildlife Federation.
And to read for you, if you really want to
know what are considered the most serious
environmental issues in Washington in 1994, one is
motor vehicle air pollution. The city is out of
compliance with the federal Clean Air Act, and it does
not seem that it will be able to be brought into
compliance with that without some very serious changes
made, much more intense car, automobile emissions
control in not just the District, but also in Virginia
and Maryland.
Urban water runoff. Every time it rains,
when you ask yourself, "Where does the rain go? Where
does the rain on the roofs, where does the rain on the
streets, where does the rain that cannot soak into the
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ground go?" it runs off, and unfortunately a lot of it
runs of literally downhill into the Anacostia River;
okay, some into the Potomac, but the Anacostia River
is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the United
States. It's supposedly one of the fourth worst
polluted rivers.
Everything you throw out, batteries, oil
from your car, antifreeze, these things that go into
the streets get washed by the rain into the rivers.
Then the question of combined sewer
overflows. When you get big rains, can the sewers
handle the rain, and where does that water go? It
ultimately goes into the rivers.
Drinking water contamination. I'm sure you
remember it was in December there was an alert for
people to, you know, boil their water because there
had been a mistake made in the reservoir uptown.
Lead exposure. I'm sure many of you are
aware now that the really serious problem of lead
exposure, particular urban children, particularly
black children, Hispanic children who live in old
buildings, who live near highways. It's estimated
that the rate of lead poisoning, not just lead paint
— we used to think the lead was just in the paint.
Now we realize the lead is also in the air, in the
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soil, in the waters.
A lot of people have — my house, for
example, is an old house, and if you look in your
basement next to where your water meter is, a lot of
the service into buildings is lead. So one of the
things I have done, I've had to buy bottled water.
I'm a middle class person, but one of the things I
have to spend my money on is buying water for my
children because my house is one of the 25 percent of
the ones in Washington where the lead levels are
unacceptably high, and that's just a cost.
When we talk about, you know, can the
average person afford cleaning up the environment,
when you figure in things like having to buy water,
and in fact, probably most of the black people who
live in Southeast, in this part of the thing, should
have their water tested. Okay? This is a case where
a disproportion is disproportionately borne by the
poorest people.
I can afford bottled water, but I'm sure
many people cannot, and we're concerned about why do
so many young black people make choices that seem
crazy. Part of it is some of them are not thinking
straight because their brains have been poisoned.
Another thing is illegal dumping. As it
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gets more expensive to legitimately dispose of things,
people have been subject to midnight dumping. A
friend of mine who has a photo studio over by the
Rhode Island Metro Station literally came to his job
one morning and couldn't get in because someone had
dumped, without exaggeration, 500 tires, you know, a
pile of tires as wide as this room and ten feet high,
in the alley leading to his place of business, and I
don't know how much it's going to cost him to get rid
of them.
So those are some of the environmental
issues right here in D.C. right now. These all have
political implications. You know, the mayor is
supporting — the current mayor and also the former
mayor — are supporting the creation of the Barney
Circle Freeway Project, which is right over the
Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge, all right, which will help
bring a lot of people from Maryland and possibly
Virginia into downtown in a more efficient manner.
But when we have to ask ourselves what does
that mean to the people who live here, okay, what does
it mean for people who have to breathe the air, I
would suggest that we need to ask ourselves are a few
construction jobs, okay, worth it.
It used to be that people say, "Well, you
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know, the federal government is paying for half of
it," or two-thirds of it or three-quarters of it, but
is that money that you get from the federal government
for six or eight months or two years worth the
construction jobs? What is the impact that's going to
have on the people who have to live here?
Anyway, I recommend this to you. It's very
detailed. It's new. It's got a lot of good, very
detailed information on what are the sources of
pollution in Washington, D.C. I think they did a very
good job.
What I'm going to specifically speak on are
four ideas. I'm going to tell you two stories. I'm
going to discuss the black patron saint of recycling,
and then I'm going to talk about some ideas that we
don't really usually consider environmental. The last
thing that I'd like to talk to you about is crime as
an environmental issue because part of what we want to
speak on is, you know, there are no buffalos in
Washington, D.C. There are no spotted owls, but when
we begin to look at an environmental consciousness and
ask ourselves how can thinking of things
environmentally help us deal with some of these other
problems, like I'm sure if we had this meeting at
night, all of us would be paranoid about walking out
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of here, walking into the parking lot, because we see
these kinds of guestions.
People have said not that long ago — it
was not too long, 1966, 1985, 1987 — "Well, black
people aren't concerned about the environment. We
have more pressing things to worry about, like crime
or like feeding ourselves every day."
My contention to you is that these are
environmental issues, and the things that we will
learn in the environmental movement can be applied to
try to deal with some of these very serious social
justice guestions.
The first thing I'm going to speak on —
these are just chapters of my book — is the history.
One of the critical incidents in the environmental
movement, what I would say is the birth of the modern
African American involvement in the environmental
movement, and I would say in many cases if people
think of the Montgomery bus boycott as a critical
incident in the civil rights movement — this is when
Martin Luther King comes to prominence. This is when
they win. Okay? This is when Rosa Parks — we know
these stories.
Well, the equivalent of the Montgomery bus
boycott is the Warren County, North Carolina, major
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demonstration in 1982, in 1982, and partly how that
comes to happen is a good way to get a picture of how
dumping — we've been hearing that black communities
have been cited for dump sites, and Warren County is
the example of how that happens.
What happens, it starts with a crime. What
happens is on June 24th, 1978, in the middle of the
night a man named Burns, a man named Burns, takes a
truck out of a company called Ward Transformer in
Raleigh, North Carolina, to dispose of PCB oils.
Okay. PCB oils are widely used in electrical
transformers, okay, which are one of the most basic
parts of all industrial societies. How do you
distribute electricity?
If you look out on electrical poles and you
see those big, gray canisters, okay, they look like,
you know, they're this big and they're round. They
are transformers. They step the current down from
five or six, maybe 2,000 volts, and the things that
come into your house at 110, which is much saver and
what appliances run on.
Inside those transformers, at least most of
the old ones, is a thing called PCBs. Okay? And
they're useful. They're very good in transformers.
They don't break down. They don't explode. They
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don't burn at normal temperatures.
However, the fact that they don't burn,
they don't break down means they stay in the
environment forever. Well, let's just say a couple of
hundred years before they break down. They're very
stable. So the same chemical properties that make
them useful to electricity make them toxic in the
environment.
And what had happened was that in 1976, the
Toxic Substance Control Act basically said that these
were cancer causing. We know they're dangerous, and
we're going to stop manufacturing them in the United
States. This is a decision that's made after Earth
Day, after the society begins to say things like, "We
have to be more careful if we're going to get rid of
this stuff, okay? We just can't make these things
indiscriminately. We're going to put a stop to that."
Okay. In '76 they say we're not going to
make anymore. Later on — that's the Toxic Substances
Control Act. Okay. It'll illegal to manufacture this
stuff, but there's still thousands, possibly millions
of transformers hanging around all over the United
States containing billions of dollars, of gallons
worth of this oil.
Now, what happens is that this guy named
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Ward decided he thought there was a business
opportunity in recycling, recycling these materials,
right, and this other gentleman — no, excuse me —
Burns thought he would go into business recycling.
What happens was this guy name Ward had a large
company making transformers and repairing
transformers, and he had about 12,000 gallons of this
stuff on his property.
In 1978, they also passed a law that says
that you now have to dispose of them in EPA approved
or approved toxic waste sites. Okay. Now, this is a
good example because, on one hand, the society is
doing something that was probably a good thing to do.
It was a good thing to stop making this stuff. It was
a good thing to decide to be more careful in where it
was disposed, but they didn't think it all the way
through and begin to say, "Well, where are we going to
dispose of it? What are we going to do with it?"
So what you have now is this man Ward has
a problem. He's got 12,000 gallons of this stuff
that's very expensive to get rid of. He doesn't know
what to do with it. This man Burns says, "Ah, I know
what to do with it. I'm going to warehouse the stuff.
I'm going to recycle it. Okay. I'm going to start a
business collecting these things, collecting this
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stuff, and then when other people want to repair
transformers, you simply recycle it by repairing
transformers. I'll have it, and I'll sell it, and
that's what's going to happen."
And what he does is he rents a warehouse in
Pennsylvania, and he's going to move this stuff from
Raleigh, North Carolina, to Pennsylvania where he's
going to recycle it and become a millionaire.
It doesn't work that way. He moves about
2,000 gallons of it, and he says, "This is not
profitable. I'll never make a dime trying to do
this," and then they decide to dump it.
So what happens is in the middle of the
night, they go out and they head for — they have
basically just a regular kind of panel truck. They
put a 750 gallon tank in the back. They fill it up,
and they take it to the Fort Bragg, North Carolina,
testing range, which is where they test artillery
shells. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's
isolated, and they just take this tank; they open the
tank up; they drain the stuff out; and they get rid of
750 gallons of it.
He goes back to Raleigh to get another
load. When he goes back to Fort Bragg, what he
thought would happen was if you just, you know, let it
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out, it would just drain into the ground and
disappear. That's not what happens. He gets there
and he realizes there's this huge — well, he's got an
oil slick. He's got an oil slick. Rather than being
a little, small thing, they can tell clearly that
something has been dumped here illegally.
He dumps the second load, and he almost
gets caught right there because what happens is the
truck gets stuck in the sand. In fact, the police
later helped him pull his truck out. They don't know
a crime has taken place.
He goes back to this guy and says, "This
isn't going to work," and then what they do is they
get another truck, and they install basically a hose
so that you can drive down the road. You don't have
to dump it out, you just open up — you screw open a
valve, and the stuff drains out, out of the truck, and
Burns and his son — I don't know exactly how many
trips they made, but in the next two weeks they get
rid of the other 9,000 gallons by literally just
driving along the roads outside of Raleigh, North
Carolina, and they just drain it. They literally just
drain it right out onto the road.
They're pretty quickly caught. The stuff
instantly kills the grass. I think the grass turns
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like blue. You know, the state troopers look at it
and say, "What in the hell is this?" They do a
chemical analysis on it. It's very clear that it's
PCB transformer oil. They relatively quickly track
this guy down.
Burns is arrested, and originally he says
that Ward has nothing to do with it. He makes a deal
with the guy to say, "I'll take the weight for it."
The guy who owns the transformer company had nothing
to do with it. Later Ward reneges on his promise to
pay the guy's legal fees, and then he is also
arrested.
Okay. Both of these guys go to jail. The
question now is: what are we going to do with this
stuff? These guys have polluted. It's not really
clear. I think it's like 110 miles of road in North
Carolina with very highly toxic stuff that causes
birth defects. It causes skin rashes. It's bad; it's
bad stuff.
The State of North Carolina says, "We have
four options." What they're going to do is they're
going to dig up the dirt. If you wonder how do you
clean up a toxic site like that, what they decide to
do was basically dig up about four feet wide and two
feet down of 110 miles. Okay. It's a huge amount of
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stuff, and they decide what are they going to do with
it.
There are four choices. One is they can
try to detoxify it at the site. They were going to
try some chemical process to see if they can
neutralize this stuff. That was one option.
The second option was they could have taken
it to a preexisting, EPA-approved landfill. I think
there was one in Texas, and I think there was one in
Alabama.
The third option was they could basically
burn the stuff in high temperature in these huge
kilns. They thought that was too expensive. They had
to move that — I think they had one in New Jersey.
I don't remember all of the exact details, but there
was a facility in New Jersey, but they concluded that
it was prohibitively expensive. That would have cost
$3 million — no, $7 million. It would have cost $7
million, and they thought that that was prohibitively
expensive.
So what they decided to do was bury it in
the state, and then they had to decide where they were
going to put it, and where they decided to put it was
a town of Afton in Warren County, North Carolina, and
it just turned out to be extremely poor. It just
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happened to be the county with the highest percentage
of black people in the entire state. It was 84
percent black. It had no city council. It was an
unincorporated county. Obviously there were no black
members of Congress from that area because at that
time in North Carolina there were no black members of
Congress from North Carolina. There were no black
state senators to go into the state legislature and
say, "No, we don't want this."
And they decided to build the dump in the
town. Now, the people in the town did not know this
waste dump was going to be put in their town until
they put up fliers saying there's going to be a public
hearing about this, after the decision had already
been made.
The people in the town, they tried to
organize. One of the things they did was they hired
a soil scientist, a guy name Mulchi, who said the site
is just inappropriate. All right. There are two
things. It does not meet two of the EPA — the
federal EPA has laid down ten or so conditions to have
a good dump, and this one cannot meet two very
important conditions.
One is it's supposed to be impermeable. So
it's supposed to be in clay because you don't want
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this stuff to leak out into the aquifers, into the
water supply. There was very little clay in this
particular town.
The second one was the EPA said that any
waste site had to be at least 50 feet — had to be in
an area where the water table was at least 50 feet
below the surface of the soil. In this case, the
water table was only ten feet below the surface, and
it was also a town where probably 95 percent of all
the people in the town, okay, got their water from
wells.
It was just an environmentally
inappropriate site. This did not stop the State of
North Carolina. It did not stop the EPA. The
community put in several lawsuits, several lawsuits,
to try to get the thing stopped, and they never were
able to get it stopped. They sued. They showed down
the process. They finally got the — there were a lot
of permits needed. They argued a lot of technical
things, that the design had not been designed well,
and finally they lost.
This story has no happy ending. All right?
They did manage to get certain kinds of things done,
which is they did get the judge to require a liner.
When they had originally designed this dump, they were
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going to put the cheapest dump they could design into
it. After several lawsuits, they did get a liner in
the bottom installed, which they had not originally
planned to install. All they planned to install was
a liner at the top and cover it with soil on the idea
that if no rain could get into the top of it, nothing
would leach out underneath.
They went to court. They did get the judge
to reguire a liner on the bottom, and they did get the
judge to reguire what they call a leachate system,
which is, I guess, you use large crushed rocks
underneath, and you can pump it out if anything does
leave it, but everything was going to be okay. This
was no problem. There was nothing to worry about.
They had the problem solved.
The people did not buy it. Okay? They
were not happy about it. They were not going to stand
up with it, and several people, a man named Ken
Fielding from the local university and a woman named
Dollie Burwell were organizing community opposition to
this, and Dollie Burwell plays a critical part for
several reasons.
One is she had been in the civil rights
movement, and people were angry. They were
considering violence. There was a very real threat
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that the people in the town were not going to put up
with this, and people were saying they were going to
get guns, and they were going to start literally
shooting at these trucks.
If you want to know, there was 8,000 dump
trucks full of material that was going to be put into
this landfill, 8,000 dump trucks. Okay. If you think
of the size of a dump truck, that's what it takes to
dig up 110 miles of roads, 110 miles six feet wide by
two feet down.
On the day that this happens, that they're
going to begin to ship the stuff, it was the first
we don't really know what the first demonstration of
black people it was against the environment. We may
find out that it happened in 1920. Okay. As we look
into our history, it's very hard to know what really
is the first one or what people have protested before,
but as far as we know, this was the first major
demonstration against a toxic waste dump in the United
States by anyone, black or white, and these were the
ordinary black people. These were the church ladies.
These were the farmers. These were not what we would
consider environmentalists. Okay? These were people
fighting to protect their community.
And starting in September 15th, it took
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them about two or three weeks to truck this stuff in,
8,000 truck fulls. Five hundred twenty-five people
were arrested, but they finally did the dump.
Now, one of the reasons why this incident
remains so important when we look at our history of
the environmental movement is two important things
happen. Two people were arrested there, and one was
our own Reverend Walter Fauntroy, who was with SCLC.
Bob Lowery from SCLC came down. He was arrested. I
believe his wife was also arrested, okay, on the front
lines, and Walter Fauntroy came down.
And there was a funny story about Walter
Fauntroy because part of what happened was they said,
"Well, can you come down? Can you help us out?"
Walter said, "I'm really busy, but I'll
flow down. I've got a small plane," and he told the
guy, "I'll be right back. Keep the engine running."
(Laughter.)
MR. RUFFINS: You know, and he went down,
and he said — the Dollie Burwell said to him, "Well,
you're a Congressman. They can't arrest you. You
have congressional immunity," and the story is Walter
said, "That's right. I'm a Congressman. They can't
arrest me."
Well, they had never seen a black
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Congressman in Warren County in 1982.
(Laughter.)
MR. RUFFINS: And Walter sat down in the
street and was promptly arrested and taken to jail.
Also Ben Chavis came down, the Reverend Ben
Chavis who was at that point the Deputy Director of
the United Church of Christ Institute for Racial
Justice. He was also arrested.
In the end, the demonstration did not work.
Okay? The dump was there. The dump was completed,
and the dump was built, and it's tragic because as
soon as it was finished, something that was going to
hold this stuff forever, literally before they could
put the cap on, they had a tremendous several weeks of
rain, heavy rain, and they figure half a million
gallons of water went into this perfectly dry
landfill, all right, eroded huge gullies that were
supposed to be — this was a mound that was supposed
to be, you know, smooth, and they would landscape it,
and before they were finished, there were huge
gullies, and the top material was mostly washed away.
And then they found that the liner of the
thing, this impermeable liner they had put in began to
balloon literally in places. They could see the top
of this thing coming off.
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What had happened is there were, I guess,
natural gas deposits under the site. So the thing
begins to balloon. So they way they solved that was
they went to the top and drove pipes down through the
liner to let the gas out.
So this Cadillac of a landfill was
defective from the day that it was built, and that was
in 1982, and to this day it is not fixed. It's still
there. There's an interview with Dollie Burwell where
she says, "Well, every time it rains, every time it
rains I wonder what's getting down there and when will
the water be poisoned."
And they say it's not just a question of
“if." It's just a question of when will it be
poisoned.
The good thing that came out of it, there
are a few good things that came out of it, which was
that was the first time — and again, I use the first
time trying to be historically correct — that the
white people and the black people in the town actually
got together on any significant political organizing.
This part I will read to you. This is the
first chapter of my book. The mobilization against
the dump completely changed the politics of Warren
County. In 1982, Afro-Americans were 65 percent of
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this population, but held only one of five seats on
the Board of Commissioners and one of five seats on
the School Board. The next year after the
demonstration, they went back and did a major voter
registration drive, okay, and got people to go to the
polls, right.
Afro-Americans captured three of the
commission seats, and there are not two blacks or a
Native American serving on the School Board. The
county elected its first black representative to the
North Carolina house and senate, and Dollie Burwell,
the woman who helped organize it, is the Registrar of
Deeds.
State-wide voter turnout in general
elections was only 25 percent, but in Warren County
they consistently get 60 percent of the people to turn
out to vote. So it was a mobilizing thing. People
came out. They lost, but they got organized, and even
ten, 12 years later, that has led to a much greater
level of community and political activity going on in
that town.
So that's the story of the first major
African American mobilization for environmental
justice.
Now I'm going to talk to a story that is
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extremely painful to me because it took place in
Washington, D.C. You can see Warren County as an
example of where poor and powerless black people were
victimized by the state and possibly by the society,
where they said, "Look. It's good to clean up this
stuff, but you're going to get it."
Okay. Had the Congress never decided to
ban the manufacture of PCBs, they would not have come
to a town. None of the people in that town got any
jobs making that stuff. None of them worked in
electrical power plants. None of them got the benefit
of that chemical. Maybe our society has benefitted
from the creation of PCBs. We have lights. Okay? We
have electricity. That is probably good, all right,
but none of those people got any of that good, and
that's when we talk about the injustice of it.
Everybody has lights, but they have the
pollution, and that is essentially what we see
happening again and again and again and again, there
may be good things produced, but some people get a
disproportionate share of the bad stuff.
Now, I'm going to talk about D.C. How many
of you were in Washington in 1987 for the bottle bill
campaign? Do you remember that? Do you remember
that?
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Well, I'm going to talk about the bottle
bill which is, in my mind, a terrible disgrace. This
is also a story with no happy ending, okay, but it is
not a story primarily about poor black people being
victimized, okay, by people on the outside. In my
mind, this is a story of how poor black people were
victimized by our own people, black ministers, okay,
black politicians, black public relations executives,
some of whom were good friends of mine.
I used to be in the PR business. So I know
some of these people personally. Okay? Where
basically people's feelings of black solidarity and
nationalism were exploited, and racism was exploited
to fight an idea that would have been a good thing for
our community, and then I'll start to tell the story
now.
It should have been easy to pass a bottle
bill in 1987. Okay. Seventy-two percent of the
people in Washington thought it would be a very good
idea to put a deposit on bottles and cans. Most of
the older people, most of the people in this room, I'm
sure, who are over 50 or even — excuse me — who are
my age remember —
(Laughter.)
MR. RUFFINS: I'm sorry.
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— remember when we were children that
people took bottles back. Okay. There was a deposit
on bottles. This is before probably most things came
in cans, but there was a deposit on every bottle. It
did not seem like an oppressive idea. It did not seem
like a conspiracy against the poor. It did not seem
like white people trying to fill your house with
roaches. Okay? It seemed like a good idea.
(Laughter.)
MR. RUFFINS: People experienced it. It
did not seem oppressive that you had to take the
bottles and cans back to the stores. It was an idea
that had worked for years and years. All right, and
that's an important thing to remember. This is not a
new idea.
Okay. It should have been easy. It should
have been easy to pass a bottle bill in '67. The
District has some very unique — well, the District is
small. Okay. It's only 44 miles. All right? It's
not like most states that have upstate. There is no
upstate in D.C. Okay? There's no rural areas where
you can build dumps. Okay. It's landlocked. All
right.
There's only two facilities to get rid of
things. One is the Benning Road. Twenty-seven
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percent of the trash went to the aging Benning Road
incinerator, okay, and the other 70 percent went to
Lorton.
Well, the Lorton landfill is almost full,
okay, for a couple of reasons. One, it's been
operating for years and years and years. Two,
Virginia has its own solid waste disposal problems.
Maryland has its own solid waste disposal problems.
In the '80s, the Greater Washington Area was the
fastest growing area of any place in the country.
Rockville was the fastest growing city in the '80s.
All right? This was a construction boom. The
population in this area has doubled.
My wife grew up here, and she said, you
know, Gaithersburg used to be a horse farm. So a
Metro in Gaithersburg is kind of unbelievable now.
It should have been a perfect place for a
bottle bill. The District of Columbia has always been
a politically progressive place. Okay? We have
supported rights for gay people. We have supported
health care coverage for everybody. We have supported
gun control. Okay? We have traditionally been the
kind of political or community that recognizes these
political issues, okay, and what was good. It should
have been just our kind of issue to say, "Let's clean
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up the streets."
If you have an honest kid, let him make
money cleaning up the street. It seems like a good
idea. It should have passed.
Again, the first poll said 72 percent of
the people including, which by definition means more
than 50 percent of all the black people, thought that
a bottle bill was a fine idea. Okay. What happens?
Not to mention the bottle bill had been
introduced. Okay? The bottle bill started in 1974.
Most people don't realize that a bottle bill has been
introduced into D.C. at least four times, at least
four times. In 1974, a bottle bill passed. It was
introduced by the late Julius Hobson, was the person
who introduced it. A stone progressive black
politician introduced the bottle bill into the city
council in 1974, and it passed the city council by a
vote of six to three. It was vetoed by Mayor
Washington, who was concerned that they would lose
business, that the stores in D.C. would lose business
to Virginia and Maryland.
It just turns out that Loudoun and Fairfax
County in Virginia also passed bottle bills around the
same time, in the early '70s. Those were thrown out
of court because basically under a technical thing.
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That was a bit of state legislation that a locality
could not do on its own.
Montgomery County has a bottle bill on the
books, by the way. This is a very well kept secret
during the campaign. There is a law in Montgomery
County that was passed at approximately the same time,
that if they passed a bottle bill in either the
District of Columbia or Prince George's County, it
would go into effect.
So, in fact, had they passed a bottle bill
in D.C., it would have instantly kicked in the one in
Montgomery County, dramatically reducing the chances
that businesses would have lost any business across
the county line.
This was never brought up. Okay. Then in
the mid-'80s the bottle bill was reintroduced. Hilda
Mason in 1984, Hilda Mason introduced a bottle bill
into the city council, putting I think it was a — she
and Polly Shackelton introduced a bottle bill into the
city council, and it was bottled up by Nadine Winter.
Okay? Nadine Winter would not let this out of
committee. Nadine Winter was against; she was just
against it.
She was working with an organization. I
forget what it's called — the Keep America Beautiful
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Foundation, which is funded by Coke, Pepsi, Budweiser,
Reynolds Aluminum.
(Laughter.)
MR. RUFFINS: Okay? People who make — and
she bottled it up.
PARTICIPANT: Pardon the pun, right?
MR. RUFFINS: No, but it's true. She never
let the legislation out of committee in the city
council. It stayed there dead for three years.
In '87, Hilda Mason came back again and she
and Wilhemina Rolark from across the river, Ward 8,
okay, two black women — first a black woman and a
white woman, okay, Hilda Mason and Polly Shackelton,
long-time respected Washington, D.C., organizers
introduce a bottle bill, and then in '87, two black
women introduce a bottle bill, okay, Hilda Mason and
Wilhemina Rolark. Wilhemina, who represented — are
we in Ward 7 or Ward 8?
PARTICIPANT: Eight.
MR. RUFFINS: Who represented this ward
introduced a bottle bill into the city council.
Okay. Nadine Winter would not let it get
out of committee. Once again it was not allowed out
of committee. Okay. They were talking about
voluntary recycling. The industry did not want them
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to put a deposit on the bottles. Okay? The industry
said, "Well, we can have a clean-up. Well, we can do
this. Well, it should be voluntary. Okay. No, it's
too much trouble."
She never let it out of the committee, and
it was only after that in 1987 that basically three or
four white environmentalists tried to put it on a
bill. If you want, one was Jim McCarthy, who's
chairman of the Washington Deposit Coalition; Gene
Karpinsky, head of the U.S. Office of PIRG, U.S. PIRG,
which is right down on Pennsylvania Avenue.
An interesting thing that Calvin Rolark has
told me, that PIRG was one of the first things he
funded through the United Black Fund. Yes, yes,
Calvin Rolark said in the early '80s, when they
started PIRG, which was part of Ralph Nader's research
group and came out of Ralph Nader's organization, that
the United Black Fund funded them because they thought
they were such a good, responsible community
organization and that the community needed a kind of
government watchdog organization.
And then there was a guy named Jonathan
Puth from Environmental Action. These are three —
they're all white — three guys who introduced,
basically made the move to introduce the bottle bill
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as a referendum. No, it was an initiative. It was an
initiative. Let me see if I've got it right. I don't
know if it was actually technically an initiative or
a referendum. It may have been a referendum because
they were responding to something that was already in
the city council. It's not really important, but you
take it basically to the citizens.
All right, and they decided to do that.
They started collecting signatures after the '86
primary, and they easily got the 50 or whatever,
20,000 signatures they needed, and immediately the
industry began to fight them.
Okay. The metropolitan area liguor
distributors, you know, coalition fought it. They
went to court to keep it off the ballot, and then they
began to — as they got their signatures, more and
more people got upset about it. The people who
decided to fight it the most was from Mid-Atlantic
Coca-Cola. Okay? I'll tell you who. I don't need to
personally name any bad guys, but the guy who was
chairman of Mid-Atlantic Coca-Cola was the main bad
guy in this. Okay?
And that's when they formed the Clean
Capitol City Committee, okay, which was the group,
okay, that fought the bottle bit. It was chartered in
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Maryland. It wasn't even in D.C., okay, and when they
had their first meeting, okay, when they called their
first public meeting, the people from Coke weren't
there. The people from Budweiser weren't there.
Sterling Tucker was there. Okay? They paid Sterling
Tucker $10,000, okay, to represent them, and he later
denied that.
Okay. They tapped into — Sterling Tucker
tapped into an organization he had founded when he had
been chairman of the city council, the organization of
100 black ministers. All right? Sterling Tucker went
directly to — he sent the letter to the minsters'
organizations. Okay?
And time after time throughout this whole
story, okay, they went to well respected black
community leaders to fight the recycling. So when
they had their first rally, which was held in a big
hotel in downtown, you didn't see the faces of the
industry. Okay? You didn't see the chairman of Coke.
You didn't see the chairman of Pepsi. You didn't see
the guy who was president of the Glass Packaging
Institute. You saw Sterling Tucker. You saw Reverend
Ernest Gibson from Mount Rising Baptist Church, okay,
who had been head of the Washington Council of
Churches, coming out against recycling.
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It was terrible. It was a terrible thing
to see, okay, and what happened was ultimately they
used black community leaders, black community people.
They brought media in, in every black newspaper, and
I had a black newspaper just about then. So I went
and spoke to — they went on the Cathy Hughes Show.
Ultimately a very cynical group of white corporations
got the black civil rights leadership of Washington,
D.C., to fight a bottle bill.
And every time you go out think about that.
Okay? So when you see the bottles in the parks and
the bottles and the cans in the streets and you
remember that we were exploited, okay, people did not
understand. Black people at that point — and I know.
I've spoken to some of these people. They said,
"Well, we didn't really know."
Okay. They hadn't begun to understand
where our environmental issues were. They thought
that the million dollars that the industry gave to
public relations consultants and Cathy Hughes and the
Afro to buy all of this radio and television time was
a good investment.
But every year since we have not had a
bottle bill, it has cost the city about a million and
a half dollars a year to pick up those bottles, okay,
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at a time when we're talking about laying off city
workers. It was a terrible decision. It was a
terrible decision, and the community has to be very
careful.
I mean if there's anything that comes out
of it it is that we must be very careful who speaks
for us. We must be very careful and seriously sit
down and define what our interests really are, okay,
so that a few dollars to black newspapers, a few
dollars to political consultants, and a few dollars to
black television time does not constitute doing good
things for the community.
That was a terrible story of that. Now for
the good new.
(Laughter.)
MR. RUFFINS: The good news is that there
are tremendous, tremendous, tremendous possibilities
for solving the problems that we see. You know, you
talk about, well, what about crime? What about the
fact that people cannot find jobs? Okay. What does
this have that, you know, particularly there seem to
be real serious problems with young men? They cannot
find jobs. Okay. They cannot feel like men. So they
decide to feel like men by proving they can shoot
people.
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Okay. They don't have constructive work to
do. They see no future, and I said to myself when I
began to write this, I said: where in black history
can we look; where can we look for our ancestors?
Where can we be guided by the people who went before?
And I looked around, and in the first
chapter, first page of my book, I started out by
saying that people need to remember why Martin Luther
King was actually in Memphis when he was killed.
Martin Luther King wasn't supposed to be in Memphis.
Jesse Jackson and Andy Young urged him to come on.
They were doing the Poor People's Campaign, okay, to
come to Washington.
Martin Luther King was in Memphis to
support the sanitation workers on their strike. All
right. In other words, these people who are cleaning
up the urban area, you could say the bottom line
troops of recycling; that's why he was in Memphis.
That's why he was in Memphis when he was killed.
But then I looked back and I said, well,
you know, Elijah Mohammed was another person. Okay.
Elijah Mohammed talked about "don't go into those
stores. Make your own clothes. Have your own
businesses. Get out of this consumption. This
consumer consumption is killing us. The cars are
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killing us. The bottles are killing us. We're being
buried."
And when we consume, we are now burying our
brothers and sisters because all of the new dumps,
trust me, if they're not burying them in black areas,
they're going to be in Hispanics. I look for an
ancestor, and I found one. I found an ancestor, and
I almost cried when I read this.
George Washington Carver, Scientist and
Symbol. It's a scholarly biography published by
Oxford University Press, and I began to say: where
are we compared to the black people in Tuskeegee,
Alabama, in 1900, 1895, when people were starving,
when people were desperate, when people were
uneducated, okay, superstitious, okay, and George
Washington Carver had this idea that God had given you
everything you needed to make a better life for
yourself.
And we talk about the things he did with
peanuts. It wasn't just this. He said to these
people, "Look. If you've worn out four farms" — and
one cotton farmer said, "Don't tell me that." An old
black man said, "Don't tell me how to farm cotton. I
know how to farm cotton. I've worn out four farms."
(Laughter.)
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MR. RUFFINS: Right? And he said, “You
know, if you blow under the leaves, if you take the
horse manure, okay, you can replenish the earth around
you. "
And he said, "Don't just grow cotton. If
you grow cotton, you'll stay in debt. You'll stay in
debt. You'll stay in debt, and your children will be
starving because in the wintertime you'll have to go
down to that sharecropper's store and spend that
little money on fatback and molasses, okay, which are
not nutritional. Instead of trying to grow more
cotton and spend that money, if you grow half an acre
of vegetables, your children can eat."
Okay, and one of the things is he was very
interested — he did not have a lot of traditional
gender roles. He was very good at sewing. He was an
extraordinarily good cook. He said to the women, "You
know, you can take those corn husks, and you can have
rugs on the floor. You can have curtains on the walls
of your shack."
He said to the men, "If you wash that red
clay, you can wash the red out of the clay and have
color in your life. You can have a better life for
yourself and your children" through what we would now
say recycling, at a time when people were desperate,
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and they had nothing.
We have so much here, and I want to end by
reading you about two people in this area, okay, who
are really doing that. One is a guy named D.K. Wesley
Copeland, who is a chemist, right, who is with the
National Academy of Science, and one of the things he
did about 20 years ago was he went into the ghettos of
Caracas, Venezuela. Okay. I mean terrible
conditions, terrible.
He said, "What resources do we have?" They
said they took and they looked, and he was an
engineer. He looked around and, you know, all we see
are magazines and newspapers and tin cans and stuff.
They started a business. They took a garbage
disposal, a regular garbage disposal like you have in
your sink, okay. What can you do with a garbage
disposal, old magazines and newspapers and a screen
door?
Well, with enough water and enough
magazines and a regular, old garbage disposal, you
could run the magazines through the garbage disposal,
you could screen them out on a screen door, and you
can make beautiful writing paper. You can make very
fancy stationery. It's extremely expensive, and they
set up a small factor in this community making
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stationery and note paper literally out of the funny
papers with a very small thing.
They said, "People don't have enough to
eat," and they said, "All we see in the streets are
tin cans." They did hydroponic gardens. There was no
room for regular gardens, but they did tiered
literally in boxes, in wood boxes, hydroponic gardens
out of tin cans. Right? They started them end to
end, and they made everything they needed to do that.
He has an office in downtown. There's
another guy who's literally called, okay, the George
Washington Carver of the Prisons. The guy's name is
James Ingram. He's an industrial engineer. He has a
company called Design Recycle, right, and they make
all kinds of things. They make stuff from tires.
They make stuff from glass. You can make marble, you
know, kind of artificial marble from unsorted glass.
You can make park benches from plastic milk jugs,
these things.
But what he recycles is people. Okay. He
has a furniture. He teaches furniture refinishing and
upholstery in the Prince George's County Jail. Okay?
He takes guys who have never done anything
constructive in their lives, all right, and teaches
them you can do something. You can do something with
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your hands. You don't have to just kill people. You
can be a productive person.
He has — generally about 50 percent of all
the guys who go to jail go back to jail. He has
achieved a recycling rate of about 93 percent. Only
three percent of the guys, and they're mostly all men.
I don't mean to be sexist about this. Only three
percent of the inmates who go through his program come
out and go back to jail today.
And what he said to me, "This guy doesn't
understand." He says, "This guy thinks what he's
doing is refinishing a chair." He says, "He's not
refinishing a chair. He's rebuilding his own life."
(Applause.)
(Whereupon, a short recess was taken.)
MS. BROWNE: We have a luncheon planned.
Lunch is only half an hour. So we'll have the panel,
hopefully generate some questions at the end of the
panel, continue questions through lunch, and then come
back for the afternoon program.
As Steve indicated, the fact that the
Anacostia Museum is convening this morning in Allen
Chapel A.M.E. Church, it reflects a coming together of
various segments of our community to address
environmental issues.
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This panel also reflects a variety of the
differing disciplines and training and experience that
have come together to address environmental justice
issues. We have legal issues. We have scientific
issues, and in terms of our scientists in the
environmental justice movement, they really have
replaced the sociologists that were so crucial in the
civil rights movement in the '50s and '60s. Our
scientists today are the Kevin Clarks that testified
in the 1954 Board of Education decision.
So what I would like to do is to have the
two scientists address the health effects on us, on
our communities, on our children; also the effects of
pollution and failure to take care of our environment
on the land, the air we breathe, and the water we
drink.
And we're going to start first with Jim
O'Connor. His bio is introduce in the materials to
this program, but basically he's associate professor
of geoscience at UDC. He's also taught at the
University of Maryland, at Boston College, and he's
the national coordinator for minority participation in
the earth science program.
Each panelist will have essentially 15
minutes to present their topic.
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Jim.
MR. O'CONNOR: Well, good morning, and I
want to thank Laura and Joanna for inviting me to be
one of the scientific experts.
I have spent 22 years studying the real
underground of Washington, D.C., and my job today is
to make you aware of the rich cultural and natural
history of this side of the Anacostia River, as well
as to help you be better stewards by understanding the
whole role of history on this side of the river.
And what I would like to start out with to
get you in the frame is to go back to 192 6 and to
bring black spirituality and the environmental
movement together through the renowned African-
American poet Langston Hughes, through his poem The
Negro Speaks of Rivers .
I have known rivers. I have known
rivers ancient as the world and
older than the flow of human blood
in human veins. My soul has grown
deep like the rivers. I have bathed
in the Euphrates when dawns were
young. I have built my hut near the
Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I
looked upon the Nile and raised the
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pyramids about it. I heard the
singing of the Mississippi when Abe
Lincoln went down to New Orleans,
and I've seen its muddy bosom turn
all golden in the sunset.
I have known rivers, ancient, dusty
rivers. My soul has grown deep like
the rivers.
That poem has not ended. We are now in the
Anacostia area, and the Anacostia is your
spirituality, and that's what I want to talk about
today, is this side related to the wonder river.
And the first thing I would like to do is
tell a myth. Contrary to the American rivers David
Letterman Top Ten, our river has never been cleaner in
the last 20 years. The last two years have seen major
changes in the guality of the water. It is the best
guality judged by chemistry, judged by the fish over
the last two years, and judged by the sea birds coming
in to eat those fish.
The geology on the bottom, however, is
another whole story, and probably in my lifetime it
will never be cleaned up unless somebody invents a new
technology to eat it and clean it in place.
And the east bank is much cleaner than the
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industrial and urbanized west bank in Ward 6.
Now, where am I going to start? One of the
things that was just mentioned was that science is now
the social studies of today. Without science you're
dead in the water. Every citizen must know the
appropriate science. Let me repeat that. Every
citizen must know the appropriate science, and you've
already seen that a little bit this morning because
I'm focusing on the end of today's title, and that is
"Just Us," and it's you that need the knowledge to
protect your environment.
The survival of the fittest depends on
those that understand the habitat that they're in, and
only you have a neighborhood. Every neighborhood
needs to be preserved. Every of the 53 neighborhoods
in the District is polluted, but nobody is going to
worry about your neighborhood except you because
they're worried about theirs.
There's where the activism comes in, and
what I want to share with you today is to protect all
of the good things that are already over here on this
side of the river. The eastern shore of the District
of Columbia is wonderful. The best open spaces and
natural spaces are in part of the green necklace over
here. They need to be preserved for the next century,
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and they are under stress, believe me.
And with that what I'd like to do is take
you through a little, quick history of seeing all of
the peoples and the natural resources that are over
here, similar to what we did two weeks ago when we
looked at 46 sights over here on the good, the bad,
and the ugly.
Would you show the first slide?
I'm going to run through these just to give
you, again — you need an equal foundation before this
afternoon. The first thing is to look at the census
data as a map. In this case, everybody is blue. So
we're all blue.
And within that, keep in mind now that
Washington, D.C., is just nothing but an urban oasis
within the larger Chesapeake Bay context, but it is a
very important context.
(Simultaneous conversation.)
MR. O'CONNOR: But keep in mind now this is
what we're talking about, is one little blue oasis
from outer space, and it does show up from outer
space.
What we really need to understand is the
foundation, physical geography. Why is your
neighborhood unique? We are part of the Anacostia
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Valley, and the whole Eastern Shore is nothing but a
big, giant cliff, and all weather basically comes from
this side of the world and slams against your
neighborhoods. That's all I'm going to say about air
pollution. You need to understand the meteorology,
but these cliffs are beautiful.
The other aspect is looking at what's under
your feet, and that is the basic geology, the same
geology that fostered George Washington Carver to play
games and goes back to the lathyritic soils of the
tropical belts of the eguator, is the wonderful red
clay on either side of the Anacostia River.
That red clay, you see, goes all the way
along the mid-blocks from Eastern Avenue all the way
down to almost the tip at Southern Avenue. It is a
major importance for the history of the area.
This is what it looks like. Four hundred
feet thick. It is why we have all of the bricks, not
only here, but in the rest of the city. This is our
natural resource for brick, but this is one of our
creatures. It got wiped out and burned. This is the
D.C. dinosaur that lives in those swamps that piled
out that red clay delta higher and deeper on this side
of the city.
There is a rich history, but keep in mind
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now if kids could find this stuff, and that of all
ages, you could make a fortune, especially if you
found the eggs.
(Laughter.)
MR. O'CONNOR: We are just now
rediscovering some of this ancient climatic past. As
the green line tunnels through both towards the
University of Maryland area, the middle of the city,
and certainly out in this area, we are finding more
and more bones. This is what a dinosaur bone looks
like as it comes out of the subway.
So there are rich histories to play with,
but we really need to look at the people history.
This whole belt of red clay goes from Gay Head,
Massachusetts, all the way down to the Richmond City
Jail in Richmond.
Why be concerned? It is physical hazard,
not chemical hazard. The biggest problem on this side
of the city is physics, not chemistry. How many of
you recognize this spot? One person. This is 0
Street and Branch Avenue. It took $3 million to put
a wall up here. Most of you have probably seen the
wall off Pennsylvania Avenue. This is why one has to
worry about the red clay. Your house is going to go.
Your habitat can be moved if you wet this red clay.
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So we have all kinds of wonderments, from
the super landslide that wiped out 95 roughly 20 years
ago, to the 0 Street slide, to the Hillcrest slide, to
the Benning Road slide. I can go on and on. Most of
them have been fixed, but somebody had to pay money.
In the '70s, the city put in a law so this
wouldn't happen, and you must now have geotechnical
studies before you can build houses. So we put in
laws to protect you against Mother Nature, and yet we
see people don't understand science. If you recycle
the bottom of the slide to the top of the slide, then
you haven't taken a course in physics to see that if
you pile everything on the top, it's going to slide
down the hill.
(Laughter.)
MR. O'CONNOR: So George obviously didn't
go to UDC and take a basic science course or he
wouldn't have spent all of that money doing that.
Now, part of understanding this is what
piece of time do you want to talk to me about. In
this neat map here, which you may or may not be able
to see from the back of the room, it has a bunch of
colors. So when I go back, this blue line along here
is where the Native Americans live. That is the
shoreline of the Anacostia on the Eastern Shore here
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back in 1792, when Washington, Banneker and Ellicott
were planning out this neat-o chunk called the
District of Columbia.
There's a red line in here to show just
before the Civil War, and the black lines you probably
can see are today's shorelines of the Anacostia and
the Potomac. You've lost two-thirds of both rivers
downtown because of reclamation to create land for
Anacostia Park, for East Potomac Park, et cetera.
Oh, yeah, that has a lot of fun. What is
all of that stuff? Where did it come from to go in
the water?
Well, these people knew a lot about
geology. They had to live off the land. The 150
people that lived here every summer, they loved it
here because the land was good to them. They had the
first outdoor education school of preparing the
geology to make the goodies that they needed to
survive.
This is what their villages looked like.
This is the real Anacostia. What happened to those
people? What kind of environmental goodies took care
of them? And when did they go down the drain?
We now have their record. So as the subway
system dug up Suitland Parkway to put in Anacostia
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Station, this is some of the stuff they found. So we
now know how good — all that's left is the geology,
but we know a whole bunch about those people from the
tools, and this was not for crime. This was for
survival of a different sort.
And then, of course, we have big changes.
Because we are a seaport, then people could come by
tall ship to visit us, and starting in the 17th
Century, people came to visit and take care of the
good resources, like the beavers and other good things
that were around here. They also took the trees to
fix their boats and the tar along with that to patch
up the boats.
And with that came another plan. Totally
wrapped up in our local history is the role of
tobacco, not the nasty environmental goodies that you
could argue about out of tobacco and air pollution of
today, but the money of yesteryear, and not only the
money of yesteryear, but the whole role of bringing in
people to make sure that you could harvest the crop,
and not only do we have two-legged beasts of burden.
We also had four-legged beasts of burden and hence the
name "Oxen" of Oxen Run and why these kind of
creatures had to walk all the way up Good Hope Hill,
and you had a cabin at the top.
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But notice now the plantation area is very-
wrapped up not only with cultural and social history,
but also with the beginnings then of the filling in of
the Anacostia with sedimentation, and people lived off
that wonderful clay. The same clay that gave the
bricks and gave nourishment to the tobacco gave
nourishment to all that lived, as well as economy to
a few.
That has not changed, and then, of course,
the next era as we jump from plantation days, we
become planned cities, and we have Andrew Elliott
taking care of some of the downtown things, and we
have the mathematician, astronomer, surveyor Benjamin
Banneker doing all of the work early in the morning as
he used the rising sun and the setting moon to plot
out all those wonderful boundary stones that some of
you saw last week.
So along Eastern Avenue and Southern Avenue
every mile is a Banneker boundary stone, and remember
now that was done 2 04 years ago with the sky and a
piece of chain, and they are accurate, not by
kilometers, but by miles, and here they are.
There is the original District of Columbia,
ten by ten by ten by ten. So what district are you
dealing with? And, again, this isolated core of the
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Eastern Shore is an important piece of that whole box.
And with that we get to see there are
cities within the box, and dealing with that, you want
to look at all of these rivers. So one of the neat
things about looking at that is the two most important
goodies in the emerald necklace over here, and that is
because of the Civil War the green space is protected
over here in a beautiful line, and besides the green
space, you have the rivers.
But the key I want to leave you with in
understanding this is this city is built on seven
steps, seven bottoms of the Potomac River, and that is
an important key because the developers understand
that if you stand at the edge of one of these steps,
you will see forever, and we can go to our Lady of
Perpetual Health panorama view and see from the top
step that you're sitting on right now. We can drop
down to Saint E's and go to Artis Point at Saint E's
and see that wonderful view of L'Enfant City.
We can go down to Douglass' house and see
the hill and sit on his front porch and see that
beautiful view. We can drop down to Minnesota Ave.
and wonder why Minnesota Ave. is so flat across the
whole length that it drives.
These are river terraces similar to where
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we plunk the neighborhood called River Terrace, but
all of these are important because your problems are
related to this diagram. Each of these diagrams has
springs that have been lost. There's a river cutting
down through, all through the bluffs from Alabama Ave.
down to the Anacostia. There are streams cutting down
through all of these stairs.
And people have said that valley for the
river is ugly. Let's fill it in. So one of them is
God's dump because nobody protected the valley.
Nobody has put up signs saying, "This is the name for
my stream," and there are more than 12 streams over
here. So you can go through and look at the meanders
of the Potomac. You can look at all of the rivers of
downtown that are lost, but these are your rivers all
along here that the federal city and regional
governments do not fully recognize because you have
not said, "I want a sign. I want to know the name of
my river. I'm going to protect my river."
These lost rivers of the Anacostia are an
important key. They're all alive and well, but they
need someone to look at them. They need someone to
keep them. They need stewards, and the dirtiest river
in this city is note the Eastern Branch. It is this
river here that you call Suitland Parkway.
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Go out and see it. Find it. So when you
see all of that ooze and leachate coming out of Saint
E's, it following a river that is a tributary. When
you go to George Washington Carver trail and see the
tires in Zora Felton Branch, it's all part of
Stickfoot Branch.
See your rivers at Dupont, Watts Branch,
Piney Run. See these are the things that are here.
You're not protecting the good stuff. This is what
everybody is after, and you have the Anacostia
Watershed Society. Maryland takes care of their
stuff. We need to deal with all of these goodies down
here, and if you don't say, "I want a sign, and I want
to protect my rivers," who else is going to do it?
They haven't done it yet.
So get off your fanny and look at your
river. Walk and find. If you see a road that goes
downhill, there has to be a river at the bottom of
that hill. Simple science. Then follow it until it
hits the Anacostia, and this is what we're talking
about now.
There's all kinds of wondrous things. This
is how they filled in the rivers. This is my geology
of today. How do you do this? It ain't there. This
is the sedimentation of the Eastern Shore of the
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District of Columbia. This is how they did God's
dump. It's not by nature. It's by 10-wheelers or 12-
wheelers. That's not in my geology book.
And also don't forget about this. What's
under your street? By organization, everybody has to
have their own little goodie, and when they come
around with the spray cans for environmental graffiti,
you get to see orange is for telephone and TV cable;
red is for electricity; blue is for water; green is
for sewage; yellow is for natural gas when you call
Miss Utility. All of those things are under your
streets and under your properties.
One needs to be aware of that because it
changes the ecology underground, and this is the kind
of thing that's important. Here is our city dump from
the '50s and the '60s. This is the Kenilworth
sanitary landfill now known as a national park. This
is where it was before Lorton, but keep in mind now if
this started in the '50s what happened with all the
trash before the '50s? It's someplace in the city.
I guarantee every ward has at least two dumps, and it
ain't on nobody's list up here.
Well, one of the things that was important,
and Paul talked about that stuff earlier, this is a
safe place because it's totally lined with that
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wonderful red clay, unlike Saint E's which was not
lined. So it is oozing out, and that's where it is.
Here it is right here. It's right next to Kenilworth
Gardens.
And we just spent $2 million planting
trees, planting plants in here, $2 million tax money.
How many kids from Woodson Senior, Anacostia Senior,
et cetera, were involved with this project? All of
those things were planted by hand by students. Zero
from D.C. That's going on now.
This is your Bible. The first urban soil
survey by the federal government in the United States,
done by two black, African American agronomists of
soil sciences. This is where the information is about
your neighborhood.
If you don't know how to read it, then
you're environmentally illiterate, and you need to see
Jim Butler over there and make sure his office and
Ferial's office runs a course so that you are literate
about the soils for gardening or for safety in your
back yard.
Now, this looks like just a map, but colors
mean environment. I don't care what kind of earth
science map you get. If it's colored, every color is
an environment that needs to be understood, and we
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have less with old maps. This is where I make all my
goodies, is from studying old maps, and I even
discovered since my trip the other day, there was two
railroads here on Nanny Burroughs Avenue area, not
one. I always thought there was one, but it's now
houses.
But the reason I put this up, and the next
slide will blow it up a little bit more, is to show
you now here is 1950. Here is the Potomac Electric
Power plant, not like it is today, and here is the
Kenilworth marshes. There is no dump. There is a
race track where the Mayfair Apartment complex is, was
the old city race track. We've drastically changed in
44 years. We've totally filled all of this in.
So you need to get a sense of history of
your land. You need to understand what's under your
feet and the water-land relationship. You need to be
aware of not only Mother Nature, but all of the things
that people have done to land. You need to be able to
go back and look at history and look at today.
Here is the Anacostia River, and here is
the vegetation. The law today would prevent this from
happening because the Pennsylvania farmers can't let
their cows into the river. Well, we don't have cows,
but, see, that's illegal. There we encouraged it to
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eat the hydrilla. We might have to bring cows back
when you clean up the Anacostia.
(Laughter.)
MR. O'CONNOR: So remember now one of the
neat things we have lost that is not only rich black
history, but rich D.C. history is this is a marine
seaport. This is founded by the founding fathers as
a seaport. Don't lose that heritage. Use that
heritage. Bring back the tall ships. Bring back the
fish, and don't ignore the subway.
There is wonderful ecology, not only the
rat ecology, but keep in mind now the whole role of
having a subway go through is important economically.
It is important developmentally, and you need to be up
front with this and not wait until everything happens.
The developers know what's over here. They
see the natural resources as an amenity to putting up
wonderful highrises on slopes that will easily erode
away. So when you start looking at the year 2000, pay
attention to transportation, and the old railroads are
probably the dirtiest spots in the city because they
were the industrial corridors, but don't ignore the
Metro as an ecology system in its broad sense.
And, again, one of the things I wanted to
leave you with: this is our background in the city.
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Unlike the report that came out this week which is, I
would say, a poor high school edition, this is the one
that has the GIS, and there's a whole host of these
kinds of city reports that people are ignoring that
have been put out by your university for your
neighborhood.
So when you start looking at this now, this
is what we're talking about. Listen to your elders.
Pay attention to the kids coming along. This city has
some of the best environmental education programs in
the country for urban education, and they're going to
get better.
But at the same time, don't ignore all of
the history that we have. Pay attention to the land.
Listen to the land. Read the land, and as Frederick
Douglass would say, "Agitate," but agitate from a
strong knowledge base, not from emotionalism.
Thank you.
(Applause.)
MS. BROWNE: Our next presenter is Dr.
Geraldine Twitty. Dr. Twitty has a doctorate degree
in biochemical genetics from Howard University.
Recently she took a sabbatical to work with the
Environmental Protection Agency and Office of
Environmental Justice when she co-authored a paper on
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protecting endangered communities.
She also organized a lecture series
entitled "Environmental Justice, Environmental
Injustice."
Dr. Twitty.
DR. TWITTY: Good morning.
PARTICIPANTS: Good morning.
DR. TWITTY: I'd like to thank the
committee for inviting us, and I want to thank them
for inviting you because I think we need each other to
get where we have to go, and where we have to go is
along a route that will change our environment from
what it is now to where we can survive.
There is an old Mexican proverb that says
that it's unwise to dirty the water around you because
you might have to drink it. I would like to
paraphrase. It's unwise to dirty our environment
because we have to live in it.
So it becomes our agenda; it must become
our agenda to do something about it.
I just want to show you a couple of
transparencies because I've been asked to talk about
what's poisoning or what potentially can poison us.
Our drinking water; air; occupational
exposure; our food; many of our so-called medicinal
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drugs that are intended to help us; and then we have
incidental and accidental exposures. That's all of
what we are about, so that there's no one particular
facet of our environment that can be considered to be
free of hazardous materials that jeopardize our
people.
We've all heard and we know very well that
disproportionately African Americans are affected by
these various hazardous materials. To what extent?
Let's look at some statistics.
According to our Environmental Protection
Agency, industries in the United States generate about
265 million tons of officially classified hazardous
waste per year. That translates to about one ton per
person.
In addition to that, there is another 40
million tons of unregulated waste that is hazardous
that is produced. By far the greatest volume of
hazardous waste is produced by the chemical and
petroleum industries. Together they account for
something like 71 percent of our hazardous materials.
Another 22 percent or so can be attributed to metal
refineries, and all of the other industry contribute
about seven percent.
Imagine some 60 million tons, 60 million
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tons of hazardous waste that enter our air and our
waterways and our niches that our friends, our plants
and animals, normally habitat, and that happens each
year.
The General Accounting Agency has
identified some 425,000 abandoned hazardous sites.
Yet as late as 1990, only 1,226 of these had been
recommended for Super Fund clean-up. Some 444
different toxic chemicals are associated with these
abandoned sites, and if we tried to list maybe the ten
top, we would look at lead. We would look at
trichloroethylene, toluene, benzene, PCBs, chloroform,
cadmium, chromium.
You've all heard these names. They're not
new to you. We accept them. We shouldn't accept
them.
If we look at what environmentalists
commonly refer to as the five worst polluting
chemicals, we can look at what we call total suspended
particulates, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, nitrogen
oxides, volatile organic chemicals, and what I've done
is to try to show a relationship between particular
kinds of pollutants and particular facilities that are
most associated with producing that kind of entity.
Total suspended particulates, things that
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come into our air and settle back down on our soils
and in our waterways primarily as a result of
industrial processes and burning of fuels, coal, wood,
oil, natural gas.
Look at carbon monoxide: transportation.
Some very large proportion of the pollution which the
Washington metropolitan area experiences is associated
with transportation. Do you have any vague idea of
how many registered vehicles there are in the
metropolitan Washington area? The document which has
been referred to a number of times today, Unfair
Share, documents some 2.8 million registered vehicles.
These are people that live in this area,
and what about all of the buses, all of the school
kids who come into our area on a regular basis and
bring their transportation woes to us?
Carbon monoxide is an odorless, colorless,
very, very highly toxic gas. What does it do to us?
The best known involvement has to do with the fact
that carbon monoxide preferentially and irreversibly
binds with hemoglobin. That's the red stuff in our
red blood cells that normally transports most of our
oxygen. Well, if carbon monoxide is preferred to
oxygen as a binding substance, as a transport
substance to hemoglobin, how is it going to help us?
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This means that the very parts of our
bodies that produce energy and help to regulate energy
are going to be compromised, and so we can have then
a whole syndrome of ill health effects that are
related to the incidence of carbon monoxide in our
environment.
Sulfur oxides, again, fuel consumption.
These fuels inappropriately burned and contributing
extra sulfur to our environment. Sure, we have
natural sulfur. Anybody who has done any wetland
moving about knows very well that we have sulfur in
the environment naturally, but we are talking about a
great increase in the amount of sulfur.
Sulfur oxides combine with water in the
environment, and what do you get? That nasty stuff
called sulfuric acid. It'll eat a hole in anything,
and it eats a hole in most things. In the atmosphere
the sulfuric acid is a part of this business of the
acid rain that we have.
Look at nitrogen oxide. Again, almost
equal contributions transportation-wise, stationary
fuel combustion. Much like the sulfur, the nitrogen
comes from burning these fuels at very, very high
rates and very, very high temperatures, and again,
much like the sulfur, the oxides combine with water.
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You get nitric acid, which is as detrimental to living
things, whether it be plant or animal, as anything
else. This likewise contributes to the acidity in our
rainfall, and so we plant our vegetables, and we
expect them to grow, and the rains come, and what
happens? The plants die.
What good are plants to us? It's where our
oxygen comes from. So if we don't maintain our green,
living things, the plants in our environment, how are
we going to get our oxygen? What's going to be our
source of oxygen?
I just want to address another particular
issue, and that's one that I think many of us
overlook. Indoor air pollution. How healthy is our
indoor air? Not very healthy at all. Look at what we
have to do. Smoking and environmental tobacco smoke,
which is second-hand smoke; lead from a variety of
sources. Fortunately we don't eat, I don't think,
much canned foods anymore, particularly the canned
foods with margins soldered together with lead.
Radon; asbestos; formaldehyde; the insulation in our
homes; the foam carpeting under our carpets; household
cleaners: ammonia, chlorine, insecticides,
pesticides. Sure, you spray for roaches. You use
chemicals to keep down the moths so your clothes don't
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have holes in them.
You're killing yourselves. You are
creating an internal environment which is far worse
because we spent about 90 percent of our time indoors.
We can't afford to let this continue.
Where do we need to go? We need to go to
school and learn what we need to do to make our own
individual environments healthy. Begin at home. We
always say that. Education begins at home. Make your
home a safe environment, and then step outside. Make
your external environmental as healthy as you make
your internal environment.
How? We've got to work together. We have
a lot of work to do. We have a very short time to do
it because our young people are being hurt. Your
sixth graders exposed to large concentrations of lead
are learning impaired. Their growth is stunted.
Their nervous systems are damaged. We can't allow it
to continue, and I think we're all here today to do
something about it.
Thank you for having me and good luck.
(Applause.)
MS. BROWNE: Thank you, Dr. Twitty.
The comment about the role of education in
the environment is a wonderful way to lead into our
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next presenter. Ferial Bishop is the Administrator
for the District Environmental Regulation
Administration, and in that capacity she's the
coordinator of environmental education and other
outreach programs on behalf of the District of
Columbia.
She also, like Dr. Twitty, has spent her
time in the Environmental Protection Agency, working
at that agency as a biologist and gaining extensive
expertise in the area of toxic substances, water
pollution, and research, and she has another
connection with Dr. Twitty. She graduated from Howard
University, as well.
Ms. Bishop.
MS. BISHOP: Thank you.
I'm just going to stand here and talk to
you a little bit about what we do in my role. You
heard from Dr. O'Connor, who gave us a wonderful
history and explanation of what's happening in our
area.
My role is one of the regulators. I am the
Administrator for the Environmental Regulation
Administration here in the District of Columbia. I am
the one who is responsible for enforcing the
environmental laws on the books.
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When Congress passed over the past years —
I think they are up to about 12 or 14 laws passed by
Congress — those laws went to the Environmental
Protection Agency to administer, and what EPA does is
then to develop national programs for the United
States and outside on how they're going to administer
and implement those laws passed by Congress.
In addition to that, those same national
environmental programs are passed out to the regional
offices, of which there are ten in EPA, who then in
turn feed it down to the states.
District of Columbia is considered a state
along with the other 50 states, and therefore, we are
obligated, we are mandated, and we are required to
implement those laws passed by Congress. If we don't
implement those laws, we suffer the same results as
any state in the union, either through sanctions,
either through having their money taken away from
them, or a whole host of environmental sanctions and
penalties.
So when you think about the Environmental
Regulation Administration, which, by the way, is
housed in the Department of the Consumer and
Regulatory Affairs, an odd couple, but that's where we
are, then you will note that we have the same
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responsibilities for insuring that life in the
District of Columbia is to the extent that we can make
it a quality of life for all of us through the
enforcement of all our regulations.
I'd like to say just a few words about the
Environmental Regulation Administration so you will
know who we are and where we are. I did say that we
are part of the Department of Consumer and regulatory
affairs. Years ago, long before I came, it is a fact
that the District of Columbia government perhaps did
not, in their infinite wisdom, see the necessity of
having a department on the environment for many
reasons.
Certainly back in the '7 0s and the '60s,
the whole notion of environmental protection was not
like it is today. It is my understanding that back
then a lot of what we might do today used to be part
of what was called Environmental Services, and then
there was a reorganization in the early '80s, and a
lot of that responsibility went to the Department of
Public Works, and some went to the Department of
Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.
When I came in right behind the mayor.
Mayor Kelly, the first thing that I noticed was that
environment and housing were hooked together. It was
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called at that time Housing and Environmental
Regulation Administration, and I knew from my
background that that was not to be.
And so the first thing that I set out to do
with the permission of the director and the mayor was
to separate those two. Housing is just as important
as environment, and there was no way that they could
have, in my opinion, had a very informative program by
being together.
So the first thing we did was reorganize
and realign, and in doing so we elevated the whole
notion of environmental protection up a notch. So
today you have the Housing Regulation Administration,
and then you have the Environmental Regulation
Administration.
I am hoping and praying that one day this
ERA will be its own cabinet level. I think it needs
to have a representation at the cabinet. It needs to
be visible, and it needs to play a more important role
than it perhaps is doing now.
Nevertheless, there are about 100
scientists, engineers, chemists, biologists who make
up the Environmental Regulation Administration. We
have three focuses that we are looking at right now.
Number one, of course, is that we are a
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regulatory body who enforces the regulations within
the District of Columbia.
Secondly, we are involved with
environmental education and outreach.
And, third, which is a new idea coming on,
is looking at environmental economic development
initiatives in environmentally related jobs on the job
market.
The first division that we have is the Air
Resources Division. You've heard a lot talking about
our air pollution. You need to be aware that we,
along with Northern Virginia, Maryland, and most of
the states up the Northeast, are in nonattainment
status. What that means is that our air exceeds the
threshold of any kind of standards that we should
have, and we are working very vigorously with our
northeast states to try to reduce our air pollution by
a variety of ways, either through mobile sources,
which is the car, impact of cars on the city;
stationary sources, which would be impact of places of
Pepco or our printing operations or the Capitol Hill
heating plant and the like.
We have a second division which deals with
water resources, and that one regulates our surface
water, our groundwater, and monitors the water and the
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rivers and the groundwater to make sure that they are
not exceeding our standards.
Remember that when we are in the regulation
business, we have to adhere to a certain standard, and
therefore, the staff then goes about monitoring these
various sources of pollution to insure that they are
not going to exceed whatever threshold or standard
that we're talking about.
A third division deals with soil resources,
and I think Dr. O'Connor did a lot to explain to you
about the concerns that we have vis-a-vis our land and
the quality of land over here on this side of the
river, which is more unstable than on the other side
of the Anacostia River.
Finally, we have our fourth division that
deals with pesticides, hazardous waste, underground
storage tanks, and in that division, again, we are
registering underground storage tanks to make sure we
are on top of what does or does not leak. We are
looking at generators of hazardous waste, and we are
monitoring them from the cradle to the grave, if you
will.
We are still in the business of allowing
pesticides on the market, and that does seem like a
contradictory statement, but we are in the business of
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issuing licenses to insure that companies like
Terminex are, in fact — and monitoring them to make
sure that they are staying within their guidelines and
the requirements when they use those pesticides.
We are pushing a program called IPM or
integrated pest management, which talks about
alternative approaches to using chemicals as a
pesticide. I would like to suggest to you to go to
the drug store and buy a bottle of boric acid, just
boric acid. It's on the shelf, and if you have roach
problems, use boric acid. Just sprinkle it along the
sides of your border of your walls and see whether it
works because when you buy some of those chemicals off
the market at the Hechinger's, read the label and you
will discover that in some of them they do have boric
acid, but you can just go and buy the boric acid
yourself in a bottle and sprinkle it around, and let's
see what happens. It does the same thing as an
insecticide.
I need to rush on. I have not very many
minutes, but I just wanted to bring to your attention
the fact that we have — there isn't a group in the
District of Columbia that is vigorously enforcing the
environmental laws. I like to think that we need to
partner. We need to work with you. You need to work
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with us.
As Dr. O'Connor says, there are lots of
things that you can do on your own to protect
yourselves and your neighborhoods, but there are also
times when there's a need to bring in the guns, and
the guns are the regulatory agencies to come in to
help us and help you make certain that your
neighborhoods are free from pollution.
We don't have much resources. In fact, my
program is run primarily on federal grants. Right now
we have about 21 grants that are sustaining this
program, and the money that we get from the District
of Columbia government is very small.
So with that little bit of resources, I'd
like to think that the staff does a magnificent job in
trying to protect you and me from our polluters and
from those midnight folks that come across the border
to do all of the dumping that we have.
The Anacostia River is getting cleaner.
The fish are coming back. We have a fisheries
management program that does research to monitor and
insure that we are doing all that we can to bring the
fish back in the river.
It probably still looks brown in places,
and that's because of all the runoff that's running
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off into the river, but there are a lot of people; it
takes a whole lot of folk to work together to try to
clean up that river. That is the mayor's priority
focus in the environment. It is certainly a focus of
Maryland. We've got the Corps of Engineers, those
folks who, on the one hand, dredged and created this
problem now working with us to plant grasses along the
river to bring the river back to its natural shape.
We've got the White House who's now gotten
involved looking at the Anacostia River. We've got
folks up on the Hill. We've got Representative
Norton's bill that she introduced to try to set some
of that money aside for the Anacostia watershed.
So from our vantage point, there are a lot
of people who are trying to bring back the Anacostia
River. I like to think that we all are working
together. There are some things like combined sewer
overflows that will require a lot of money, and there
are some other things that will require paradigm
changes, changes with us, how we treat the water and
how we treat the banks along the bay, and what we do
with the trash and the tires, and where do we dump the
batteries.
That's a paradigm changes that we have to
make and that with your help, you will go back to your
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neighborhoods and talk about the other folk and how
they should change their mindset on treating the
environment, the neighborhood, the rivers, the
streams.
I'd like to talk an awful lot more with
you. Somebody tells me when you get me started, I can
go on and on and on, but I am very appreciative that
you asked me to come here today, and if we can talk
afterwards or if you have some questions, and in the
interest of time, I will stop at this moment, and just
say thank you for your time because my time has
lapsed.
(Applause.)
MS. BROWNE: Thank you, Ms. Bishop.
Back in December 1993, Joanna Banks, whom
you may have met as you registered to come in this
morning, and I attended a meeting of the National
Council of Churches, and at this meeting, one of the
speakers was Vice President Gore, and we had many
different religious denominations represented at that
meeting, and we had church.
At that same time, Vice President Gore made
a commitment that the Clinton administration would
pass an executive order or adopt an executive order
addressing environmental justice issues.
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We have with us today Robert Knox, who's
the Deputy Director of the Office of Environmental
Justice at the Environmental Protection Agency. He
also has a Howard connection. He was a visiting
professor there, and he has been with EPA for several
years, previously serving as Director of the Office of
Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization.
He holds his Master's and Bachelor's degree
in environment engineering and management, combining
the science with the policy making.
Mr. Knox, please.
MR. KNOX: Thank you very much.
I can see that lunch is being prepared
here. So I'm going to try to be brief.
(Laughter.)
MS. BROWNE: Fifteen minutes.
MR. KNOX: Geri gave me five minutes.
(Laughter.)
MS. BISHOP: She gave me give.
(Laughter.)
MR. KNOX: Okay. Let me talk to you a
little bit about our executive order. Rachelle
mentioned that the executive order was signed by
President Clinton on February 11th of this year, and
the executive order really looks at environmental
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injustice.
It says that the federal government at all
levels, all agencies are starting to deal with
environmental injustice, past present, and future.
Now, that's easy to say and very difficult to do, but
let's talk about it. Let's talk about environmental
injustice just very briefly.
Environmental injustice. Well, you can
define environmental justice, as some people call
environmental racism. Some people refer to it as
equity, and sometimes it's just called environmental
justice. Essentially there's a difference in the two,
and hopefully we're moving toward environmental
justice all the time with things like the executive
order.
We
at one
time
in EPA
used
the
term
"environmental
equity"
and
you'11
see some of
the
literature that we've
given out
here
even
has
environmental
equity,
reducing
risk
in
all
communities.
However,
we
changed
the
name.
We
stopped using that term because some of the people,
such as Deeohn Ferris, who's going to follow me,
looked at that issue and said that environmental
equity actually meant spreading pollution around
equally.
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(Laughter.)
MR. KNOX: That's not exactly what we had
in mind, and what we were talking about is equal
environmental protection in all communities, you see.
So when the Browner administration came in,
one of the first things they wanted to do was change
that term and move to environmental justice because
that was clear. The definition was clear, and more
people understood what we were talking about.
Earlier this morning Paul talked to you
about some issues, such as LULUs. I'm going to
briefly tell you about LULUs and then about BANANAS.
LULUs and BANANAS, that's what this whole issue comes
down to.
First of all, LULU is an acronym that
standards for locally unwanted land use, and what
we're talking about there is what do you do with land
when you can't use it for anything else and when it's
in a flood plain or if it's an industrialized area or
something like that. Usually you put public housing
there because you're trying to find a place to place
public housing, and you need to keep land, and
invariably you'll put it in industrialized areas.
Look at our public housing. Most of the
public housing in our country is in an industrialized
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area. In fact, there's an area called the Toxic
Doughnut, which had all kinds of terrible polluting
industry, and it had a dump right in the middle of it,
a garbage dump, and they cleaned the dump off and put
public housing in, a large public housing project, and
it's surrounded by — and the people who live there,
the children who live there, don't stand a chance.
They stay sick most of the time, and it's just a very,
very difficult situation. That's LULU.
Another LULU, you heard about lead this
morning, and lead is a serious issue. Lead, in
Dallas, for example, in west Dallas, they were going
to build public housing, and so they were looking
around, and they found a LULU, and the LULU was on the
down wind side of the lead smelter, and they built
this public housing project there, and so the kids who
lived there are just inundated with serious problems,
learning disabilities, neurological problems, brain
damage, and things like that, serious problems.
The kids who live there, very few of them
graduate from school. They have very low IQs, and we
know that children who drop out of school invariably
drop out of school because they have learning
disabilities, not because they don't have the right
clothes to wear and all this sort of thing.
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So we know that lead — and we've known
about lead, incidentally, since the days of the
Romans, you see. You see, the Roman Empire came down
because of lead poisoning. See, the Romans used to
drink wine out of lead steins, and the acidity in the
wine was breaking lead down inside, and the Romans
were actually dying of lead poisoning.
So we've known about lead for a long time,
and yet lead is pervasive in our environment, and we
have not taken adeguate steps to try to get it out,
and that's one of the things that we're going to try
to do, and it's very difficult to get lead out of the
environment.
It's in air. It's in the soil. It's in
our pipes, in our water lines, and that sort of thing,
and we've used lead for years, you see, and now we're
talking about it, but we've got to get lead out of our
environment.
Anyway, that's another LULU. Okay. I'm
going to talk to you about one final LULU here in
Washington. See, what happens with LULUs is that it
doesn't only occur in the environment. It occurs
where you have poor people, where you have people who
just economically don't have power, or — and I think
the most important one is they don't have political
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power, and any time you don't have political power in
our country, you get dumped on. That's where they
place all of the facilities because you don't have
anybody to speak for you.
So there was another LULU that was
occurring here in Washington, D.C., and LULUs occur
when we build highways because where does the highway
construction always go? It goes then for communities,
but the land is cheap, you see, and so when the
Highway Administration is going to buy up land, they
look for cheap land, and invariably they send
communities of color over in poor communities, and so
they buy up this land.
And this happens all over the country. In
fact, when I was a kid, I was raised in the City of
Philadelphia and during the time that highway
construction was going on, and we moved three times.
My father finally said, "I'm going to move next to the
highway so we don't have to move again."
(Laughter.)
MR. KNOX: The only way you could get
stability was by being near a highway, but, see,
again, we had leaded gas. So people living near a
highway, you've got the lead thrown out on you, and
you've got a lead in the air and that sort of thing.
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Okay. So in Washington, D.C., now you've
got highway construction, and you've got 395. Where
are they going to put 395? Right, of course, in
Washington, D.C. They were going to connect Virginia
with Maryland, and connect 95 up by a split right
across Washington, D.C., and do you know what stopped
it, stopped the LULU? A LULU ran into a BANANA.
(Laughter.)
MR. KNOX: — nothing anywhere near
anybody. That's BANANA, B-A-N-A-N-A, build absolutely
nothing anywhere near anybody.
This LULU that was being planned, 395,
stops dead in its track where. New York and New Jersey
Avenue because one person. Reverend Smallwood
Williams, and Reverend Smallwood Williams said that
highway is not going to go through my church. He
stopped it dead in its tracks.
And that shows you that with people, when
local people can get power and communities come
together, they can change a LULU into a BANANA.
(Laughter.)
MR. KNOX: And that was Reverend Smallwood
Williams. He changed a LULU into a BANANA, and that's
what we're talking about when people organize and take
charge of their communities.
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And, you know, in the United States if you
don't organize and take charge of yourself — you
know, we fought the war from the British. The United
States had to get strong and organize itself. Civil
rights, civil rights, if we had never marched in civil
rights, we would have never integrated a thing.
Washington would still be a segregated society, and
you wouldn't be able to go into restaurants right now
had we not organized and said, "We're not going to
tolerate it anymore. We're going to stand. We're
going to stand still and take our civil rights," and
that's the way to do it.
The homeless people, until they get
organized, they're going to stay homeless because do
you know what happens? You don't see it, and they
become invisible. Homeless people are invisible. You
drive down the highway and you don't even see them.
They stand at the corner.
One time during the winter it was like four
below zero in Washington, D.C. I was coming into work
in the morning, and I came down South Capitol and
there was a homeless guy standing at South Capitol and
M Street at seven o'clock in the morning at four below
zero. I'd been passing homeless people by just like
most of you, but anyway, I saw this guy out there at
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that time in the morning. I went in my pocket and
gave this guy a $5 bill because I said, "You are on
your job. You're out here in the freezing cold at
zero degrees in the morning like that." That man was
doing more work than most people were doing by staying
on his job.
But, see, homeless people are going to have
to stand up for their rights. Do you know what
happened to homeless people? They got put out on the
street. They used to be at Saint E's. They don't
have a place to go anymore. See, a previous
administration said — give minutes?
(Laughter.)
MR. KNOX: Anyway, homeless people, that's
the way you've got to take charge of your own life.
You've got to take charge of your own communities, and
when we do that, then we stand up and say, "We're not
going to take it anymore," and people organized.
And that's what's happened in our country.
People have organized. They've got environmental
justice people. They've got people like Deeohn Ferris
who is going to come up and talk to you, who are
working with communities, organizing communities and
bringing communities together and saying, "Hold it.
You don't have to have these facilities site in your
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communities."
You have to know what your laws are, and
that's what the executive order does. It makes all of
the federal agencies look at what the laws are. It
says that you're going to comply with Title VI. You
can't discriminate in the use of federal funds, and
you've got to follow certain requirements and that
sort of thing.
And this administration is serious about
this issue. It was brought to them by environmental
activists, and they're serious about community people.
They're listening to community people for the first
time.
Who ever heard of the federal government
listening to anybody? Now they're starting to listen
to community people. They're having meetings,
inviting community people to come and sit down at the
table and start making decisions with the federal
government. Normally decisions in the past have
already been made by the time you see anything, but
now they're bringing people in at the very beginning
and sitting down and saying, "Let's start to make
decisions so people can plan their lives."
If a facility is going in your community,
you should make the decision about whether you want
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it. Is it going to be beneficial to you? And
sometimes they will be; sometimes they won't be.
You've got to know what the facts are so that your own
community can make decisions like that.
Let me stop here before I get kicked off.
(Applause.)
MS. BROWNE: I spoke earlier about our
scientists, our physical scientist and our health
scientist being the new Kenneth Clark of the
environmental justice movement, but there's one
consistency in Deeohn Ferris. She has said it all.
MS. FERRIS: Just one?
MS. BROWNE: She has followed in the
footsteps of many of those attorneys in the '50s and
the '60s and through the '70s. She is an attorney.
She started, again, with the Environmental Protection
Agency.
MS. FERRIS: The graduate school.
(Laughter.)
MS. BROWNE: She spent almost eight years
there serving as Director of the Special Litigation
Division in the agency's Office of Enforcement. She
later joined the American Insurance Association,
working on liability and tort issues, such as Super
Fund.
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In 1992, she moved over to the National
Wildlife Federation to serve as National Director of
Environmental Quality, and then later went to the
Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights and launched its
environmental justice project, which culminated in a
very definitive March 1993 quorum on civil rights and
the environment, bridging the discipline.
She has now made another move since she
visited the Anacostia Museum in January when we were
first planning this forum, and she is now working with
the Washington Office on Environmental Justice or to
establish such an office where she will continue to
coordinate and facilitate grassroot access to the
public policy development process.
We could think of no better person to give
perspective on the current state of environmental
justice.
MS. FERRIS: Hi.
(Applause.)
MS. FERRIS: I'm a little restless. So I'm
going to take it to the end of the room here.
I want to commend Jim on the slide show.
It was really educational, and I'm glad to know — and
Dr. Twitty with the health issues and Ferial. They're
all colleagues of mine.
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As you know now, my name is Deeohn Ferris.
I've been practicing environmental law for a long,
long time, back in the days when people told us that
people of color were not interested in environmental
issues. Well, they need to wake up now, don't they?
There are a lot of people of color in this
room who are very interested in environmental issues,
and I'm glad to see there are people of non-color here
also interested in those issues.
I'm real glad to be here today. I've been
living in D.C. since 1975. I came here to go to
Georgetown Law School, and I knew at the time that I
wanted to do something in Washington, D.C., that had
to do with legislation and power broking and all those
fancy things, but I didn't know quite clearly what I
wanted to do in terms of career after I went through
this gauntlet called law school.
I ended up selecting environmental law
almost by happenstance. The only thing I knew for
sure was I didn't want to be involved in a field of
law wherein all the solutions were found in dusty, old
law books. You see, I like to be innovative, and I
like to be creative, and way back then environmental
law was still a very new field, yet to be discovered
that the environment pervades everything that we do,
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everything that we do.
When I say "we," I mean we ordinary people
and I mean we industry and we government and we all of
those sectors. The environment pervades it all.
Now, as was said a few moments ago, there' s
this mythology that people of color don't care about
the environment, but back 40 or 50 years ago when
people were organizing around all kinds of issues,
most particularly labor, most particularly civil
rights, there were people of color who were also
working on environmental issues, but they worked in
groups that didn't have the word "environment" in
their name.
So as issues matured and the civil rights
movement matured and social justice movements matured
and the peace movement matured and nuclear free zones
and the labor movement matured, people of color in
these organizations started looking around and decided
that all of these issues that we've been working on,
each of them constitutes a facet of the environment.
You see, for people of color, the
environment doesn't stop at the door of the work
place. It doesn't stop at the door of the home.
Their housing is an environmental issue. Access to
transportation is an environmental issue. Education,
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economic development, fair employment, equal wages,
clean air, clean water, safe homes are environmental
issues for people of color.
I often like to say that bullets ought to
be declared a hazardous air pollutant because for
people of color, bullets are an environmental issue.
Now, this redefinition of what constitutes
the word "environment" is part and parcel of what we
call the environmental justice movement. The title of
your conference, "Environmental Justice," I'm going to
talk to you a little bit about an historical
perspective, how we got where we are today.
Fundamental to this discussion is your
understanding that the environment cannot solely be
bees and trees. If we don't protect the people, there
also will be no bees and trees.
The environmental justice movement emerges
out of a growing recognition that especially people of
color and the poor are more exposed, more often, in
more concentrated fashion to pollutants, environmental
hazards, contaminants than other segments of the
population.
Now, that doesn't mean we're not talking
about white people and that white people are not part
of this movement because, as one of my good friends,
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Dr. Bob Willard, who's a noted scholar in this
movement, says, if they can't find a person of color's
back yard to put it in, then they go find someone poor
and white.
So, the
movement emerges
out of
this
recognition
that we
need
to protect
those
most
jeopardized
because
by
protecting
those
most
jeopardized, we protect everyone.
So to what is it that we are most exposed?
Triple threat, triple threat, and when I say "people
of color," I mean the spectrum of people of color:
Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Latinos, Native
Americans, African Americans. Obviously when we're
talking about Asian people and Native American people
and Latino people, we're talking about a panorama of
folk. There are lots of tribes of Native Americans in
this country, lots of different Latino people in this
country, Mexicanos, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans. Asian
people, it's a nomenclature that we use, but we're
talking about Korean people, Vietnamese people,
Chinese people, Filipinos and on down the list.
African American people I think we're pretty familiar
with in this part of the world, but we're also talking
about Caribbean immigrants.
So we're talking about a panorama of people
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of color who are more exposed than others to the
widest possible range of risks.
What kind of risks? I talked about the
triple threat. The environment for us doesn't stop at
the door of the work place, nor does it stop at the
door of the home because people of color are most
affected by occupational hazards, indoor air
pollutants, and ambient contamination.
Now, what's ambient? That's the outdoor
stuff. Let's start there. A recent literature review
of studies dating back to 1967 shows that air, land
and water, people of color are more exposed to
environmental pollutants than any other segment.
Regional studies, nationwide studies; we're talking
about high and low level radiation. We're talking
about landfills and incinerators. We're talking about
pesticides, industrial operations, manufacturing
facilities, water pollution, consumption of
contaminated fish and wildlife because you know there
are lot of people of color who fish in order to put
protein on the table, put protein on the table. They
don't go to Safeway. They can't afford Safeway.
So about 66, 67 — what did I say?
Probably 63, 64 — I bounce back and forth between
those numbers — show without equivocation that anyone
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driving vehicles with — it might be my car. I
borrowed a car to get here. I don't know. Is it a
grey —
PARTICIPANT: It looks like a Bronco.
MS. FERRIS: AABA2P, as in Paul, B and C
118 are the tags? Okay. Nobody has that car that's
blocking people.
Okay. What did I say, 63 to 67 studies,
depending on which day I'm counting, shows that
without eguivocation people of color are more exposed
to this enormous range of hazards, but you're in the
minority.
"Minority" is a word I don't use. I don't
apply it to myself. I am not a minority.
But you're in the minority supposedly in
the nation. Nevertheless you're more exposed. That's
the ambient stuff.
Another curious thing about those studies,
more important than income, race correlates as the
most significant predictor in Los Estados Unidos as to
who is going to be exposed and when and how often,
which is more often than anybody else.
Let's turn for a moment to occupational
hazards. You know, we were talking about the triple
threat. Occupational hazards, the National Institute
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of Occupational Safety and Health tells you that
people of color are more often located in the dirtiest
and most dangerous jobs. The Occupational Safety and
Health Administration tells you that 100,000 people of
color die every year as a result of occupational
related exposures.
Let's take a little micro view of
occupational hazards, and let's look at farm workers.
Farm workers in this country are 95 percent Latino and
African Americans, 95 percent. How many years did it
take EPA to come out with worker protection rules,
Bob?
MR. KNOX: Twelve years.
MS. FERRIS: Twelve?
PARTICIPANT: It took a hell of a long
time.
MS. FERRIS: A long, long time. Meanwhile
the World Health Organization tells us 300,000
underprotected people of color who work on farms being
drenched under pesticides every year contract what?
Pesticide
related illness.
Eureka.
Up to 1,000 of
those, and these
are
estimates,
die every year
as a result of
those
illnesses.
The farm workers
tell us, by the way,
that
that rule that EPA took 12 years to promulgate isn't
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very protective. Farm workers have been defined as a
disposable segment of our population, sort of just
like some of you in this room.
So let's go to indoor. I don't want to
spend a lot of time on indoor because Dr. Twitty did
such a wonderful job with it. Let's just say that for
the sake of having something to say about it —
(Laughter.)
MS. FERRIS: — that lead poisoning is
irreversible. So we have more African American
children in this country lead poisoned, and we're
wondering what's going on with our kids today.
And, by the way, I talk about race
correlating more significantly than income. It does
so, too, with lead. Black middle class people will be
just as lead poisoned as poor. So let's not think of
this solely as a class issue. Just because you might
get a job does not mean you ain't going to be
poisoned.
People like to make this a class issue, and
in some cases it is very much a matter of poverty, but
it is also very much a matter of discrimination and
racism, and if we don't deal with the root, and
difficult as it is to deal with our word, we're not
going to solve any of these problems.
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So this environmental justice movement
revolves around these things I'm talking about. There
was an event that occurred back in the early '80s that
people like to point to as the galvanizing event in
the environmental justice movement, the event that
really spurred the growth and the burgeoning movement
of the movement.
The event occurred in the early 1980s in a
place called Warren County, North Carolina, and there
was a woman there who overheard or found out as women
often do, because, you know, women are the bedrock of
this movement, that the government was trying to do
something in her community that she didn't think was
a very comfortable thought.
Now, learned that the government and this
private company were trying to site this thing called
a polychlorinated biphenyl landfill in her community,
literally almost in her backyard, and she didn't know
what polychlorinated biphenyl meant, but she figured
it's got to be bad. So she started to do some
investigation.
As a result of her investigation, she
encouraged activism, marches, protests,
demonstrations, civil disobedience, and at the time
some pretty interesting people joined her because
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they, too, decided that it was time to start dealing
with some of these environmental issues under the
traditional nomenclature of environment, and she was
joined by then D.C. Delegate Walter Fauntroy and Dr.
Reverend, Reverend Dr. Ben Chavis, who is now
Executive Director of the NAACP, and other notables
who came down and marched with her and were summarily
arrested.
As a result of his arrest, Walter Fauntroy
commissioned the General Accounting Office study of
the placement of landfills in the South, and this 1983
GAO report found without question, even based on
status of majority-minority, that is, more white
people than black people in the South, that it was
definitely a fact that if you were black, you had a
whole lot better chance of living next to a landfill
in the South than if you were white.
That was the first sort of public study
that was done on disproportionate impact,
environmental injustice, environmental racism,
whatever you prefer to call it.
As a result of that study and his activism
around these issues, Ben, who was then Executive
Director of the United Church of Christ Commission for
Racial Justice, commissioned a national study to
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corroborate those results. The United Church of
Christ, working with activists around the country who
were doing this environmental stuff, pulled together
in October of 1991 a four-day, five-day conference,
and in your packet are the results, some of the
results, of that conference.
The first national people of color
environmental leadership summit convened, magnetized
activists from all over the United States, principally
people of color because the environmental justice
movement is very much a people of color led movement.
I will state once again for the record that doesn't
mean white people aren't in the movement, but people
of color are taking control of their own agenda and
devising their own solutions to the problem that
government and industry don't apparently seem to be
able to solve and in many cases are creating or
exacerbating.
Six, 700 people convened in Washington,
D.C., October 24th through the 27th in 1991, and
forged the principles of environmental justice, this
blue document in your packet. The charge at the
summit to each delegate who attended was to return
home and build the movement from the bottom up, not
top down, from the bottom up. It is a grassroots,
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community based, people of color led movement.
What makes it so strong is that it builds
on movements that have succeeded in the past. It has
learned the best, this movement, from movements that
haven't succeeded so well. It's multi-cultural,
multi-racial, multi—regional, and multi—issue. It s
also international because we understand that what
goes on in this country is not confined within our
national borders. It moves beyond. We have global
relationships, and people of color around the world
are also victimized by ma joritarian, as it were,
conduct.
I'm getting the high sign in the back. So
I'll wind up by saying this. It is the urgency of the
movement that has caused government to respond.
Before environmental justice activists decided that
there was going to be an executive order, it wasn't on
the agenda. Before environmental justice activists
demanded their human rights to safe, clean, and
healthy environment, nobody paid attention.
It is my cause to be here today
obviously you're interested in what you're doing — to
connect with people in this movement. United we
stand. There are similar strategies to be employed
here as have been employed around the nation,
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strengths to be drawn from the strong around the
nation. Reach out, keep up the good work, follow the
advice of all the speakers before me.
Thank you for allowing me to be here, and
next year I want to see 500 people, and I want
(Laughter and applause.)
MS. BROWNE: Before we break up for lunch,
I would like to acknowledge the elected
representatives to the Board of Education of Ward 8
and also the President of the Board, Linda Moody.
(Applause.)
MS. BROWNE: Would you like to say a word
to the group before we break for lunch?
MS. MOODY: Well, I just want to say good
morning to you. I'm going to tell you I'm not the
usual politician or elected official because I don't
like intruding on someone else's program. So I'm glad
to have been able to sit here with you for a while to
learn something also from this session.
And since you have allowed me to speak, I
just want to say that the school system also is
concerned about the environmental issues. Our
students participate in clean-up. We have
environmental programs in our schools, and I conduct
a ward-wide tour, six per year, to let our children
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see the good things that are going on in our ward to,
in essence, help them understand that we have to keep
clean ourselves as well.
So I want to thank you for this opportunity
just to speak and say good morning to you because I
think we as elected officials have to respect other
people's events, and so I just want to thank you and
say good morning and hope you have a very pleasant
conference.
(Applause.)
MS. BROWNE: Okay. We want to get you out
promptly at the time we promised this afternoon. So
if you would get your lunch, take a little break, and
come back, and we'll convene in about 15 or 2 0
minutes.
(Whereupon, at 12:20 p.m., the conference
was recessed for lunch, to reconvene at 12:40 p.m.,
the same day.)
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AFTERNOON SESSION
(12:50 p.m.)
MR. BANKS: Thank you very much, Mr.
Butler.
You know, a lot of strange things happen to
me, including a few months ago I came up to this
church and saw the lady who was the secretary to the
minister, and she and I were in kindergarten together,
and she's standing right here.
(Laughter and simultaneous conversation.)
MR. BANKS: But that was a long, long time
ago because I was born in 1920.
(Laughter.)
MR. BANKS: But when I was invited to speak
to you today I said to my wife, "That's strange." I
said, "I don't know anything about environmental
factors."
And she said, "Well, maybe you ought to
ask. "
And I said, “Well, I'll try to find out,"
but the more I listened this morning, the more I
understand the breadth of the definition of
environment and the relationships between the various
environmental factors, some of which are physical,
some social, and some economic.
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And what I decided to try to do this
afternoon is to give you a profile of what life was
like during my childhood and early adulthood in this
area, with specific emphasis on description of the
environmental forces at play, and then to continue
with a description of those forces today under
perspective of the work that I am trying to do with
the Anacostia-Congress Heights partnership.
Seventy-four years ago this area was
predominantly rural. Most of the housing was single
family, free standing. Most folks had lots, some of
them small, but some of them large enough to raise
cows and chickens and pigs and a few horses, and
almost everybody had a garden.
It was a strictly segregated community.
The area where we now sit was principally black all
the way down to the river, and on the north and on the
south there were white communities, and there was very
little in the way of intermingling.
Well, the community was principally poor.
It had some people who had opportunities for
education. So we had a few professionals. We had a
pharmacist who ran the drug store down on Martin
Luther King Avenue. It was called Nichols Avenue
then. We had a few school teachers. We had two
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lawyers. My father had finished law school in 1911,
and my mother actually went to Teachers Normal School.
I guess she graduated about 1915 or something like
that.
So we had a special arrangement in our
family. I lived in a block between Morris Road and
Stanton Road west of Pomeroy Road, where there were
three houses that my family lived in. My father's
father owned a house next to us, and around the corner
his brother lived, and his sister lived with his
mother, and we all went to the same John (inaudible)
Church, which was basically across the street, and
this is where everything happened that was important,
whether it was a social affair, a religious affair, or
a family affair.
But we were not atypical. Most of the
people in the community were related in some way or
other or knew each other well. So it wasn't a place
where you could really misbehave without everybody
knowing it, and the crime rate for this 11th precinct,
which is what it was, was the lowest in the city for
many, many years.
Now, the employment for most folks was
unskilled. Most of the men were laborers. Most of
the women who worked were domestics. A lot of women
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didn't work, but as I said, there were a sprinkling of
people who did professional or semi-professional work.
There was a structure. The institutions
were of the community. I'll just give you this as an
example. The principal of the school when I went
there was a man named John Syphax. He didn't live
here. On Sunday afternoon at St. John's Church, we
had what was called (inaudible), which was a young
people's gathering to talk about issues that concerned
us. This was back in the '20s and '30s, and John
Syphax came to that church Sunday evening at six
o'clock to attend the meeting of these young people.
It was extraordinary really. Sometimes he had to come
on a streetcar. We didn't have buses at that time.
He did have a car, but he'd come on a streetcar, and
the streetcar ended down on Martin Luther King Avenue,
on Nichols Avenue, where the old Anacostia Museum used
to be, where the theater is, and so anybody who came
on the streetcar had to walk wherever it was, whether
it was up here on Alabama Avenue or anywhere in
between.
But he used to come regularly, and I
remember it so well because I was giving a report one
evening. I guess I was about ten or 11 years old, and
after the meeting he came up to me and he said,
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"Thanks for that good report." He said, "But never,
never say 'more better.'"
(Laughter.)
MR. BANKS: And I have never forgotten it.
(Laughter.)
MR. BANKS: Over the years, in addition to
that, this was a community which because of its hilly
terrain had a number of trees, a lot of brush, and a
lot of wild berries growing, blueberries and
blackberries and some raspberries, and one of the
things that we used to do as kids was pick those
berries and sell them for ten cents a guart, which was
pretty good money for us because at that time you
could get in the movies for ten cents or 15 cents at
the most.
In addition to that, there were so many
trees growing, we used to cut our Christmas trees
around in the neighborhood, and that didn't seem to
cause any problems because everybody did it, and it
was property which people owned who lived there, and
they agreed.
But when World War II came a number of
changes came, and I'm going to describe those to you
in just a minute to show you how different our
community became.
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We all know about the river. When I was
growing up the river was an important place to go.
There was a park down along the river at the time
which was well attended by everybody in the
neighborhood. Fishing was done frequently by many of
the residents, and at that time probably the fish were
more important than they are today in terms of helping
with the family's budget.
Swimming was not publicly discouraged
because the water was clean. It was discouraged by
many parents, including mine, because every year
somebody drowned. Every year somebody drowned in that
Anacostia River trying to swim.
And the bridge, we only had one bridge at
that time, was the 11th Street bridge, and it was a
wooden bridge in the early days, a wooden bridge which
supported the streetcar crossing, if you can believe
that, but so you could feel the vibration rattling as
the cars came across.
But socially, it was a safe and secure
community, impoverished, but not anguished, if you
know what I mean, and then comes World War II. We
have a lot of vacant land out here. World War II
brought a lot of people to Washington who worked in
the war effort. There was a serious housing shortage,
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and Anacostia was a prime target for people to build
housing, this new housing that the government was
going to support.
But something else had happened. During
the '30s, some of the families that owned land here
lost it because they weren't able to keep up with the
real estate taxes, and some of the people who bought
it got the District government to zone the land R-5A,
which meant that you could only build garden type
apartments. You could build no single family houses,
not even a row house. It wasn't permitted.
That's why we have a community which is
primarily rental, 80 percent. But in addition to
that, because, as the gentleman said earlier, because
the land was cheap, it was land that was sought after
or sold for public housing. So we have eight public
housing developments out there.
But that's not the whole story because
around those eight public housing developments, there
are a number of privately owned, subsidized
developments. Now, when the subsidy first started, it
went pretty much like the reguirement was that there
not be more than 20 percent subsidized, and the rest
of the tenants had to be market rent.
But something else happened. Because of so
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many low income families living together and so many
problems which were intense and so many people from
all over the city representing government and private
organizations giving services, so to speak, there was
always — and I have to emphasize "always giving
services" — not helping people to help themselves,
but giving services, some with no promise or no
promise in the minds of the giver that the receiver
had any chance to do anything but to receive.
Now, that's an environmental factor that I
think we ought to spend some time talking about
because we had what I would call an environment of
dependence as a conseguence of both the clustering and
isolation of so many low income families together, and
then the domination of those communities by so-called
service givers.
And what had happened was the community
that I knew when I was a youngster disappeared because
when your life is dominated by people who give you the
very basics that you require to survive, your food and
your housing and your clothing, you pretty much do
what they say or else. You have to tow the line, so
to speak. We never talk about that much when we talk
about people getting welfare, but you have to tow the
line.
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I mean you tow the line, and you are not
your own man or woman, and there are a number of
people in this community today who have been the
victims of that environment, and I'm proud to tell you
one thing. We've been working here. I've been
working here with an organization with Ms. Murray and
Ms. Hawkins, and a lot of other people have been
working, too, for the last four years, and when we
first started working here in 1990, Ward 8 had the
highest crime rate in the city. Ward 8 had the
highest crime rate in the city, crime associated with
the isolation and posturing of large numbers of
impoverished people together, and the same kind of
data applies to other sections of this city that has
that kind of arrangements of families.
But I want to tell you something. All is
not lost, and I don't think we ought to ever give up,
and I'm glad to see all of these people here today
interested in changing the environment because I found
out something Thursday, Ms. Murray, at our partnership
meeting. What would you guess the standing is of Ward
8 in terms of crime in this city compared with the
other wards in the city? Anybody got a guess?
PARTICIPANTS: Third.
MR. BANKS: Ward 8 is the second from the
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lowest ward in this city.
(Applause.)
MR. BANKS: That comes directly from the
police chief and Inspector Robinson. Now, that means
that folks here have begun to know that in spite of
the denied opportunities, in spite of the
environmental forces which have been theirs for years
and years and years, that when they put their hands
together and their brains together and people like
Reverend Chambers get active and start doing things,
changes do come about, and they come about broadly.
There's a synergy to it because when folks
see somebody doing something that's good, they begin
to think they can do something good, too, and I'm glad
to say that I have been a witness to change.
And I think that we can change our social
and economic environment just like we can change our
physical environment, and physically, I'm glad to say
that a part of this whole arrangement has been
something called the Earth Conservation Corps, which
was started down on the Anacostia River a few years
ago.
They went down to Beaver Dam to clean it up
because some people had been taking advantage of the
fact that the officialdom wasn't looking and had
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dumped thousands and thousands of discarded tires down
there, and Earth Conservation Corps went down and
cleaned it up, and it's now a clean part of that
river.
A lot more has to be done, but that part of
it was done.
Now, because this is an isolated area and
we have dependency, we still have some problems. One
of the environmental problems that we have of
significance is there is a good deal of illegal
dumping, illegal dumping in this neighborhood, and
many of those dumping are coming from outside of the
city.
Now, I think we can bond together. We can
form our orange hats or whatever we want to call them
and communicate with each other and catch these folks
and get our city council to put the kind of penalties
on them that will stop them once they're caught and
they'll never do it again because the penalties will
be too high.
So I'm glad you invited me here today
because I think that my perspective is a perspective
of social justice in environmental forces, and I hope
that we will keep our hands together and our heads
together, both to pray and to work, because both are
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necessary.
Thank you.
(Applause.)
(Whereupon, a short recess was taken.)
MS. JONES: Good afternoon.
I have some housekeeping tasks. I know
housekeeping tasks come from a book, but I picked up
and had to take back — and there's some more of them
that are out, and they would like for you to bring
them back. They don't belong to us. They have to go
back. They have a blue stamp on them. Please give
them to Julia. Julia is in the grey sweater, if you
will, please. Thank you.
Good afternoon, and as she said, my name is
Theresa Howard Jones, and I'm the moderator for this
afternoon.
One of the things that caused me to think
about it, a young lady asked me how did I get involved
in this, and I remember going back in and it was
really 1959 when the city had planned to put an
incinerator in our back yard over at 20th and Stanton
Terrace, and I belonged to the civic association for
this area, which was the Garfield Heights Civic
Association, and Sterling Carroll said, "We have to
fight that thing out of here."
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Now, that was when the city was basically
quiet, and I am a Washingtonian, and I don't think I'm
a rare breed. There's a whole lot of us around here,
and you can find us if you look.
Well, we protested that and went over to
what is now the Fort Totten incinerator and dump, and
I felt sorry for those people over there, but the city
put it there. I don't think they raised their forces
against it, and even if they had, the city would have
planned and nobody listened. People listen somewhat
more now, but of course, it's always a fight.
And then I jumped over some years as I had
done some things, but I remember when the Wilburn Mews
housing first came about, and we said to the zoning
board, "They can't build without treating the land,"
and I went over to agriculture with Absolon Jordan and
we got all this information and all these books, and
we gave testimony to say, no, you can't put those
townhouses up there without treating the land.
And Walter Lewis,
who is
now
dead,
great
mentor of
mine, always plucking
my
memory
and
provoking
my thinking, he
said, "
Are
you a
soil
expert?” He was the chair of the board of zoning.
And I said, "No, but the government is,"
because I had this book, and this book is put out by
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the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
He didn't buy any of that. So what I did
was I took myself down to the treatment plant into a
class for ten days that taught me about the soil.
Well, the next time I went before the board of zoning
and Walter said, "Are you a soil expert?" and I said,
“Half way, but, yes, I am."
(Laughter.)
MS. JONES: And I told him that I had been
to this class, but that was incident to the official
records, and we did make some headway.
So I looked at those two things, and then
I've been in and out of environmental issues, and of
course, in the town meetings I'm always talking about
how the government allows the pollution of land with
all kinds of things, noise, trash, pollution, air
pollution, water pollution, and I always bring these
things up, and sometimes I sound like a broken record,
I said, but I'm right. So, therefore, the record is
broken in the right place.
(Laughter.)
MS. JONES: And I think that we have to
keep these issues in front of us. We have to keep our
actions in front of us, and we have to go get the
government's documents, as well as the private
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sector's documents, and use and quote and say these
are the things that pertain to us, and this is what
will make this kind of activity stop.
And I'm happy today to see so many people
here, and I'm happy today that we can do this in Ward
8, and I'm just happy that environmentalists came
together to say something to the powers that are, to
say, "Save us, save our children, save a tree, save a
lawn, save anything that's going to be beneficial to
our environment, and leave the earth here for
generations to come."
We're going to have a little change in our
lineup of the panel, and we're going to call on Evan
Vallianatos — am I saying that right?
MR. VALLIANATOS: Vallianatos.
MS. JONES: Vallianatos, who is a
professor/lecturer in the Department of Sociology at
the American University and a program analyst at the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and he is going
to give us a spiel today that will be beneficial to
all of us that we can take back to our communities,
neighborhoods, friends and foes alike.
Evan Vallianatos.
MR. VALLIANATOS: Thank you very much.
The discussion this morning was obviously
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focusing on domestic environment, and this is
particularly affecting this community, and I'm afraid
I have to report to you that what's happening on the
global level is not any better. In fact, I would say
it is pretty much identical.
Whether you talk about water or whether you
talk about the air or you talk about the economic and
colonial dependence that Mr. Banks alluded to and Paul
Ruffins alluded to, this is on a global scale, so to
speak.
This disaster started in 1492 when the
Europeans through Columbus discovered, so-called
discovered, America, and from 1492 to now, a little
bit over 400 years, more or less, we have had this
continued kind of colonialism of peoples by the
Europeans. They colonized them by force, of course,
and then by religion, and in the 20th Century the
colonialism continues, of course, in a different
level, a far more sophisticated level.
So that you are creating unfortunately a
mono-culture that is one kind of idea, one philosophy
that says we know how to go about resolving economic
problems. We know how to go about resolving all sorts
of other problems, tough problems, education and so
on, and that kind of model of development has been so
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distracting unfortunately so that you have right now
Africa, 30 years after so-called independence, that is
actually worse today than it was in the '60s.
You have problems in Brazil, for instance,
where the rain forest — we have the largest section
of trees in America in one spot, so to speak, and that
development model of the Europeans is pretty much a
white community, a model of development. You have
massive deforestation, the destruction of the people,
the indigenous people, the American Indians, there,
and you have the spread of disease and the spread of
all sorts of horrendous problems.
In early '92, I managed to go to Brazil for
a national conference, and I visited that space that
is the Amazon. I don't pretend to know very much
about it, but the fact that I was there, it made a
difference to my life.
You not only have the canopy of trees, but
you have this fantastic system of rivers and the
fantastic system of plants and animals, all coexisting
together. What I did not see unfortunately is that
you don't see very many Indians. You don't see very
many indigenous people left in the Amazon. Most of
them like the American Indians in North America have
been pretty much taken off where they were, and they
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have been put in a place of concentration, or to put
it in a little bit more gentler way, they are in
reservations, and they have become completely
dependent.
This is the sort of development model that
is actually causing the environmental problems. For
instance, if you look at Africa, Asia, and Latin
America and put them together, and you look at the
kind of technical assistance that they're supposed to
be receiving, the amount of money they're receiving,
the amount of money they are receiving is less, the
amount of money that actually leaves these continents.
So you have the impoverishment of Africa. Africa
today sends more money out than it receives in
technical assistance.
And you have international organizations
like the World Bank and IMF and other major banks that
continue to demand that they get paid for the loans
that some of the nasty, corrupt governments of those
places did before like the '60s and continue to do, so
that the impoverished Africas have to pay the
interest, much less the original money that they
borrowed.
And it is this kind of colonial
understanding, I think, that explains the
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environmental problems because it's that model that
pretty much continues to be transferred everywhere,
from universities to every place we go.
The problems that we are trying to resolve
today in this neighborhood, for instance, have a
global repercussion. The good part about all of this,
of course, is that you have people like you all over,
in Brazil, in Nigeria, in everywhere. Everywhere you
go there are no large organizations. They are small
groups that actually are fighting to resolve some of
these problems.
And an example of what these nonprofit
organizations or these people without power can do, it
was the 1992 Rio Conference in Brazil when the
agrarian nations put up this conference on environment
development, and you had a fantastic group of people
from all over the world that got together. In fact,
they signed their own agreements and conventions in
contrast to the official agreements and conventions
that were signed by the governments.
And in those NGO conferences or
conventions, you see ideas like sustainability,
sustainable development. You hear the ideas of, for
instance, agrarian reform, land reform. You talk
about sustainable communities, how people can actually
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end the pollution of their lives and the pollution of
the environment.
In contrast,
if you
compare those
agreements
with the
official
conventions and
agreements,
you have,
you know,
both kinds of
perspectives that by the year 2000 we're going to slow
down the export of hazardous waste, for instance, from
the United States to places in Africa. By the year
2000 we're going to diminish the amount of chemicals
that we allow into the environment to destroy the
ozone layer, and you have promises like this. They're
absolutely formal promises, and perhaps they are
social, but I think in the long term in terms of
finding solutions for problems, it's people like you
that really will make a difference.
It's the nongovernmental organizations in
Africa and Asia and Latin America that can get
together, and they understand the impact of the
environment on their lives because, like some people
said today, the environment is not just a kind of
physical environment. It is the biological species.
The environment is the whole social and biological
involvement that we actually are trying to make a
living, and unless we protect the biological
environment, we can't protect the social environment
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and vice versa. There is a complete dependence
between the two.
For instance, right now, another example of
this kind of horror story is going on in Eastern
Europe and Russia. Remember the Soviet Union
dissolved in 1991, and as a result of that, they
decided to go capitalist. So it was after that that
you have typical companies that run into Russia or
what is Russia that used to be the Soviet Union, like
jackals on a victim that's actually died.
For instance, in Siberia and the far
eastern part of Russia, you have an area that is the
size of the entire United States, and that is about
one billion hectares of forest still intact, some of
which has been destroyed, but for the most part is
intact. So you have American companies, like
Warehouser, and you have companies from South Korea,
companies even from North Korea, companies from Japan,
of course, that have been going there and they make
all sorts of corrupt deals with the local former
communist officials, and they begin to export the
trees just like they exported from Northern
California.
I taught a year in Northern California, and
my students and I saw some of this clearly. By clear
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cut I mean you have this vicinity that complete wipes
out everything that lives in that territory, and if
you should look at it from an airplane, it looks like
somebody actually bombed the place.
This is the official way of actually saying
that they manage the forest. When you talk about
forest management, that's exactly what they mean.
They're going to clear-cut, and all of these problems
are going on in Russia at this moment as we speak.
Russia, because of its system of government
before the change, they have irradiated practically
the whole country. That is, in the development of
nuclear bombs and the development of nuclear weapons,
they had to test those weapons so that the country has
been irradiated. You have places like Kazakhstan,
which is a huge country. It's an Asian country, and
they're trying to do something about it right now.
They are in charge a little bit of the Caspian Sea.
They have the Aral Sea, and both seas, which are huge
bodies of clean water, they are practically dead, not
dead, but pretty much because they were used for the
dumping of all sorts of waste, and they put all of the
petrochemical industries around the seas so that all
of the effluents ended up into the water.
Now, for instance, we are trying to
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understand the magnitude of those problems and help
them, but at the same time, I don't think there is a
real honest appraisal of all these past errors or past
mis judgments or past bad developments to say: if that
model of development didn't work, what is the
alternative?
They are not really looking at, for
instance, the wisdom and the knowledge of people like
indigenous peoples in the Amazon or in North America,
for that matter, or anyplace else and say: if we do
agriculture this way and we have contaminated the soil
and the land and now our food and our water, what is
the alternative to that?
In the United States, we have a few
problems that deal with the reduction of the poisons
that are used to grow food, but I don't think they go
far enough really to replace the toxic system that we
have in place because that's the toxic system that has
been in place around the globe, and it's contaminating
everything on the environment.
And it seem to me if you cannot have clean
water and clean food, then I don't know what is there.
But in contrast to that, as I said before,
the local people, in particular, the local
organizations, actually are moving slowly, gradually,
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without much resources, just like the NGOs in this
community I presume don't have much money. They get
together on occasions like this, and they talk about
it, and they promote ideas like sustainable
agriculture or organic farming and a system of growing
food without a dependence on chemicals, and that way
also the farming is not dependent on outsiders, so
that you have a self-reliant community.
The environment begins to heal itself if
you give it a chance, and then slowly you have the
reemergence again of democratic institutions. Because
remember we have to have diversity in nature, as well
as diversity in societies, and if one diversity gets
smashed because of the prevalence of one idea, one
culture, then you have an imbalance in the biological
environment.
So that you have to have biological
diversity and human diversity. They both are
interdependent. They both create the whole idea of
sustainability, and sustainability is the only hope
that we have really to recreate some kind of a system
of both social and political institutions that will
help the earth to heal itself, and perhaps that way we
can understand and get results for some of the other
major problems that arise out of racism, out of class
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inequality, and so on.
And the idea of environmental justice that
was stressed so much this morning, it's really very
valid, and it has, again, also global kinds of
dimensions because you have Africans who are black,
you have Asians who are not white. They themselves
face the same problems that you face in this
community.
You have the export of hazardous waste, the
export of the dangerous industries that go to these
places, and then you have the export from those
communities of the best things that they have, like
bananas and agricultural crops, coffee and everything
else. They come to the people that have the money to
purchase them.
So you have the same kind of arrangements
that are going on in this community. You have more
money going out than more money coming in, and the
kind of dependence that I think is nothing but another
form of colonialism, and this is the understanding
that we have to have really to resolve the problem.
It's not just accidental that things are as
they are. Mr. Banks, I think, gave a very interesting
and illuminating lecture on the history of this area,
and he demonstrated how these colonial forces began to
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dominate this area from the time of racism down to
today, the official racism of today, and it is this
kind of perspective of historical events that we have
to have in order to really resolve any of the global
problems.
So I hope this is what I have to say, and
I thank you for inviting me to be here.
(Applause.)
MS. JONES: Thank you, and we're glad that
we invited you and glad that you could come.
I'd like to introduce the Reverend Anthony
Motley, who is my neighbor and a good friend of mine.
Anthony J. Motley is the co-organizer of the
Redemption Ministry and Evangelistic Outreach Ministry
located in the Congress Heights section of Southeast
Washington. Reverend Anthony Motley's many community
and civic activities range from his ministry to
persons living with AIDS to his work on behalf of the
Coalition of the Homeless has won him national and
local recognition.
Reverend Motley came to me a while back and
asked about this environmental conference here today,
and I told him, yes, I was interested, and, yes, I
would agree, and of course, the museum would not let
me renege on that.
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I'd like to introduce the Reverend Anthony
Motley that we call Tony.
REV. MOTLEY: I want to first give honor to
God for I know that if it wasn't for God in my life I
wouldn't be sitting here looking at you and you
looking at me. Thank my friend and mentor and sister,
Theresa Jones, for that introduction, and thank the
museum for inviting me to be a part of this
discussion, Mr. Newsome, who is a dear friend we go
back years — as well as Ms. Banks.
To my panelists that I'm sitting here with,
it truly is good to sit in such company and to also
hear the international implications of the
environmental problem as it has been shared by the
professor.
In 1983, I started a program in Congress
Heights called the Summer Academic Program, which
reached out to young people ages ten to 16, and the
theme that we had from June 27th through August 19th
of 1983 was "Speculations of Nature and the
Environmental Motions and Conditions of Man."
Some people thought that that was a little
bit too progressive, and some folks even laughed at us
for even attempting to take young kids and share with
them the problems associated with the environment, and
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especially the environment that they lived in, the
conditions of community life.
And during that course of time — it was
about an eight-week period — these young children did
environmental air testing, quality testing. They
would take stockings from their mothers and other
guardians, and they would like build a little screen
and put it in the yard, and then they would go back
and check for the air quality, and then we would
analyze it not in terms of some type of elaborate
scientific process, but just on site looking at it and
looking at what this stocking gathered in just from
sitting there in the yard.
They also went around and took pictures of
the environment that they lived in, and they compiled
a document that they, in turn, sent to the city
council person at that time and stressed the
importance of the need to fix the infrastructure, the
streets, the curbs. These things were in
environmental conditions that impacted negatively on
their growth and development, and they saw that, and
they shared with the powers that be.
They also did some writing on the
environmental issues in our community, and they looked
at the impact of the airport being right across the
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river from where we live and its impact on the noise
environment of our community, and they even visited
the airport, and for many of them it was the first
time.
And so I'm very pleased to be a part of
this discussion. I think it's long, long overdue, and
I come now as a minister who, when we set out to do
this project back in '83, we identified churches that
we sent this proposal to to say to them, "Help us to
make this a reality in the lives of these children,"
and we got no response from the religious community
because environment was not an issue at that time, and
they had not the foresight to see that it was
necessary to enhance the quality of live
environmentally, as well as socially and politically,
economically and educationally, as well as, you know,
dealing with what these children were faced with on a
day-to-day basis.
As we begin to dialogue on the issues
pertaining to and related to the environment, i.e.,
the water and air quality, trash, toxic dumps, I would
also think that we would look at the housing
conditions, crime, drugs, violence in the community,
and especially in the context of God's creation and
our responsibility to it as God's creation.
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We've been created by the Creator, and we
must also, as we embark upon this historical dialogue,
take into account that it was on the backs of African
Americans that this country was, in fact, built, and
that we, in turn, tilled and planted harvest on the
farms and plantations of this country, in the fields,
and our blood has been shed for the ideals of freedom,
for this democratic society, as well as now our blood
is running down the streets of America's cities and
into the gutters which are filled with despair, the
lack of economic opportunities, inadequate and
affordable housing, and the tears of our mothers who
have lost daughters and sons are running in the
streets now, and the infrastructure is deteriorating
before our eyes, and the educational program that our
young people are exposed to lacks some basic
understanding and teachings concerning the world in
which we live and our role and our responsibility to
this world and to one another.
Now, when we think about theology, one of
the things that we must put into perspective is that
it's not something that is beyond our reach. The
thought of theology is not something that's beyond our
ability to articulate it. It's simply a talk about
God and where does God, in fact, fit in our lives.
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According to a young man that wrote a book
called Churches in Struggle , Norman Fong, he said in
the chapter on theology emerging out of community that
theology is first and foremost a theology for and with
a community. It must be rooted in a people's story,
giving direction for and with that community.
James Cohn, who is an African American
theologian from Union Theological Seminary in New
York, in his book A Black Theology of Liberation , says
that theology ceases to be a theology of the Gospel
when it fails to arise out of the community of the
oppressed.
Now, these two thoughts have led me to
conclude that there cannot be a succinct, effective,
and comprehensive strategy or approach arising out of
this forum or any other forum to address the
environmental issues confronting our communities
without first having a body politic that creates in us
a predisposition, a predetermined attitude, a well
thought out and critically analyzed approach agreed to
and accepted by those of us who, first, realize that
a common denominator or common ground which is based
on the theology must first of all be accountable to
God.
And so it cannot be accountable to one
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another, each other. It has to be first accountable
to God, and therefore, once we establish that as the
common threat, the common denominator, then we can
function in the term of or in the sense of community
and do what is in the best interests of the earth and
what God has created.
For in Genesis 1:28, it says God delegated
responsibility to humankind for taking care of the
earth, and it says, and I quote, "Then God blessed
them and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply.
Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the
fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over
every living thing that moves on the earth,unquote.
God did not tell us to destroy the earth or
to abuse all living things on the earth. No, what God
wanted us to do was to be responsible stewards of his
blessings, take care of what He has given us.
Now, we have not done such a good job.
Now, while we are discussing the way things look, that
is, the aesthetics of our communities and the
potential hazards of toxic dumps, lead paint, trash
dumps, and the like, I would like for us to take into
consideration a school of thought that doesn't receive
the kind of attention I believe it ought to and the
type of responses that it should in order for our
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children, because they are our future, to survive in
a time when they are confronted with a dichotomy that
begs some close, very close observation and analysis.
The fact that our children are faced with
so many social, economic, educational, psychological,
and spiritual problems, and that they are constantly
being deprived of some basic cultural, environmental,
physical, and emotional stimuli necessary to help mold
them into productive human beings is an area that
needs our attention.
We can talk all we want to about the toxic
waste, and we can talk about the acid rain, and we can
talk about the ozone layer being destroyed. We can
talk about the water pollution, but it is necessary
for us to look at the correlation between IQ, job
acquisition and performance, genetic development,
cognitive skills, SAT scores, and environmental
conditions.
Now, we must look at these things in order
to help our children to compete in and make a
wholesome and significant contribution to society.
Finally, given that the District of Columbia has
become, quote, unquote, the worst in terms of
environmental quality among U.S. cities according to
the Environmental Almanac, and compared with 50
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states, the District of Columbia ranked dead last in
each of ten categories considered indicators of the
environment in which children lived, i.e., violent
deaths, idle teens, high school graduates, violent
crime, poverty, teenage parenthood, et cetera; and
moreover, that the District's most heavily African
American neighborhoods also are its most polluted by
cars, illegal dumping, leaking oil, sewer overflows,
and other contamination, according to a report on race
and the city's environment, the church must — and it
is emphatic that the church — that institution that
has been historically the place where the oppressed
people of the world have come to receive enlightenment
and come to be relieved of their burdens and come to
seek liberation and freedom; the church, that
religious institution that sits on just about every
corner in our community, the one that sometimes the
doors are open and sometimes the doors are not.
The church, the place where our people seek
to find answers to some of the most perplexing
problems that they are faced with today; the church
must become once again the institution in the center
of a community or neighborhood wherein we can begin to
address the issues such as environmental concerns and
justice.
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If we are to begin the process of
determining the direction to address these issues,
then the church must be willing to respond and help to
lay out the agenda for the communities' redress of
those matters that have overly compromised the guality
of life and endangered yet another generation.
And so I thank you and thank you for your
patience and understanding. God bless you.
(Applause.)
MS. JONES: Thank you, Reverend Motley, and
I'm happy that you talked about the young people
because the next person on our panel to speak, I went
over and introduced myself to her, and I hugged her
because I was saying to myself, "Where are the young
people in here?"
And I also saw someone brought some very
young people who can benefit from a gathering like
this, but I spoke to Ms. Rona Carter who is a senior
student at the University of the District of Columbia,
and she has organized extensively through the United
States as a volunteer within the grassroots
communities, mostly on youth leadership training and
environmental justice issues.
I give you Ms. Rona Carter.
(Applause.)
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MS. CARTER: Thank you for letting me be a
part of this panel.
I come to you as a board member of the
Student Environmental Action Coalition and also as an
active member of the People of Color Caucus, and let
me just go on to kind of explain what SEAC is, which
is the acronym for the Student Environmental Action
Coalition.
It's a grassroots coalition of youth and
student groups in the country who are concerned about
social and environmental justice issues and have
mobilized together to create SEAC, and through this
united concern, we have over 2,000 student and high
school groups in our coalition, representing over
50,000 students in this country.
Young people are becoming increasingly
aware and concerned about our environmental issues
because I think we realize that we will inherit the
legacies of today's political and economic choices
that are being made, and I think that as we sit here
today, there are over 2,000 high school students at a
high school strategy session in Champaign, Illinois,
strategizing on an environmental agenda for this next
school year.
But I think as in all movements that we
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have today, there are a lack of students in the
movement, but also a lack of people of color, which
again, I'm involved in the People of Color Caucus.
Now, within SEAC in 1990, young activists
came together, people of color, to create the caucus
to address the marginalization of people of color in
the environmental student movement, and we have come
very far in that we have a lot of environmental
programs designed for students of color. We have a
lot of environmental youth leadership training. We
currently have a Sustainable California Youth Project
in California.
And, again, SEAC is led and organized by
students. We have no — nothing against adults —
(Laughter.)
MS. CARTER: — we have no adults or older
people, should I say, in leading roles in SEAC. It's
student organized and student led, and you know, this
new environmental justice initiative which includes
the Sustainable California Youth Project is a national
effort of people of color, youth and students, people
of color across the country to begin to educate and
train a lot of young people whose doors have basically
been closed on environmental issues and understanding
what it is and how and why it's so important to get
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involved at this point.
And I think that, again, in D.C. we'll be
having the environmental justice initiative in the
fall. We'll be getting students from the D.C. high
schools to get involved in the initiative. It's a
mentoring and leader trainership process, but I would
like to reiterate what the Reverend has said, that we
must begin at first before we can begin to learn or
really expect to understand what the environmental
justice movement is; we have to begin at the root
causes of why they're lack in that.
We have to begin with their lack of
understanding what racism is and how that plays a role
in their everyday lives and why, you know, within the
environmental justice movement racism plays a major
role in that, and that process will begin in the fall
so that we can begin to build leaders and applicants
of people of color to become leaders in this movement
as has been lacking since it's kind of come out.
Again, we are not the only ones; SEAC is
not the only one involved in this student
environmental justice movement. We have students
groups across the country. We have the Latinos and
African Americans who call themselves Toxic Avengers,
and they go in their communities, and they're fighting
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against hazardous waste issues.
We have indigenous youth in the Indigenous
Environmental Network who are battling indigenous
issues and religious freedom rights, and we have also
international students within our network. It's
ASEED, an acronym meaning Action for Solidarity,
Environmental Equity, and Development, which includes
62 countries of international students who have
mobilized and come together to deal with race,
population, policy, and development, and sustainable
economy.
And we actually were very successful at the
Earth Summit in 1992 in bringing over 2,000 students
there and having them represented on the U.N. board,
representing ASEED.
So this is again to say that students are
involved in this movement. We're forcing our way in
there, but we're getting involved, and we're trying to
open the door for those who aren't, who aren't getting
involved or those who are kind of closed-minded or not
really attuned to the issue.
My statement is brief. Basically that's
what I wanted to say here. Again, thank you for
letting me come and speak with you.
(Applause.)
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MS. JONES: I'd like to say, Ms. Carter,
that we're glad to have you here and we're glad that
you came.
The next person on our panel I went over
and introduced myself to him and indicated that I read
his Anacostia Watershed newsletter, which is very
informative. I do take it to work, had it with me
today, but I left it on the seat of the car, but this
past issue had a lot of information in it, and people
who would like to read that paper ought to tell him
that and get it and read it because there's a lot of
information in that and things that you can use in
your own neighborhood.
His name is Robert E. Boone. He is the
Executive Director of the Anacostia Watershed Society
and co-founder and president and CEO of a unigue,
citizen-based conservation society whose primary focus
is to, quote, clean the water, recover the shores, and
honor the heritage of the Anacostia Watershed.
I give you Mr. Boone.
(Applause.)
MR. BOONE: Well, first of all, I'd like
everyone to stand up a minute and break the spell of
taking a nap after lunch. Take a deep breath. Thank
you.
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Second of all, I'd like to express my
appreciation for this event happening and for the
sponsor Smithsonian putting this on, and there's got
to be more of these. We just can't wait until next
year at this time to have one of these. We've got to
have one in Ward 6, one in Ward 5, one in Ward 7.
It's critical that these sorts of meetings happen
because there's not enough people in these communities
taking care of their communities. They just don't
have the information. They are not aware of what's
going on. They're not aware of the plans that are
being made behind their backs about their community.
And I'm here to bring a message, and I'm
not concerned about how you think about me or what the
color of my skin is. I've got a critical message here
I want to deliver, and it's a message that we should
take to heart and we should take to our friends and
neighbors who live in this part of town because
there's some bad business happening.
But before I get to all of that, I just
want to give you a little prologue of what we've been
up to in the last five years. I'm sorry I didn't
bring slides, but I get carried away when I get into
slides. So I just brought these.
This is what's happening on the banks of
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the river of the Anacostia. Imagine this in your
front yard. Well, this is the front yard of the
Anacostia community, that river, and this is what you
see there after a good rain storm.
And what are our good governments doing
about it?
PARTICIPANT: Nothing.
MR. BOONE: Nothing.
Well, now the D.C. government did get a
good grant from the EPA, and it put up some trash
booms, and that did work for a while, but they ran out
of funds, and so that was the end of that.
But the irony is that much of this trash
doesn't even come from D.C. More than half of it is
coming out of Maryland, and what are the Maryland
governments doing about it?
PARTICIPANTS: Nothing.
MR. BOONE: Nothing.
We've been hounding on them for a good
while to do something about that, and we are making
some slow progress, but it's really slow.
This group, the Anacostia Watershed
Society, has removed about 80 tons of trash off of the
river, 80 tons, and we hope to be out of that business
soon. There are low cost solutions to the problem,
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and one of them that the D.C. Public Works Department
developed was putting the trash booms up to collect
the trash, but they've got to be put up way up in the
tributaries.
Now, there are some stuff coming down from
Watts Branch and Hickey Run and other tributaries in
the District, but all of the tributaries need to be
done.
We were talking. Mr. Banks, he's left, but
he mentioned this psychological environment of
dependence. Well, I feel like this trashed river is
exerting this oozy psychological pall over the whole
community. You go to a school and you look out the
window and you see the trashed river. What kind of
message does that deliver to the kids? We can't play
here because the community doesn't care enough to
clean this area up. This is the dump.
And they see other kids going to beautiful
rivers and enjoying it. What kind of subtle message
are we sending to the young people? We don't care.
We don't care about this community. We don't care
about this river. We just don't give a damn. That's
really the strong message that's being sent.
I read a Chesapeake Bay report. They were
doing a survey of the fish out in the Potomac here in
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Washington. The water was clear. You look down six
feet. A school of fish were swimming by. You could
see them there, and they were digging up the sediments
to look and see what kind of micro invertebrates were
there in the sediment.
Then they moved over to the Anacostia.
They dug up some sediment from the Anacostia that had
a oozy, foily smell to it. The fish they caught had
tumors on them. So this is just an excellent example
of what's really going on between the two communities
here in Washington.
But as Jim pointed out, the river is
getting somewhat better. The sediments on the bottom
aren't, but some of the water quality is improving,
but at the same time that there's millions of dollars
being spent on government programs or other programs
to clean up the river, there's other parts of the
government that are pushing as hard as they can to
destroy the parkland along the river and to put in
this super highway right in the middle of town, this
Barney Circle Freeway.
This community is down wind from that.
This community is going to suffer more than any other
from the impacts of Barney Circle. This community is
not responding to this issue.
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I just got word from a Senate subcommittee
the mayor is sending her people over there to Congress
saying there's very little opposition to the Barney
Circle Freeway, very little. That's the word that
Congress is getting about the project.
Well, we're going to bring a different
message, but we need more people who live here in this
community saying, “We don't want it. We don't need
it. It's just a negative. It's a very big deficit to
the health of everyone here and the children of the
next generation."
That's what got me into this river clean¬
up, my son. I wanted to have a place so that I didn't
have to drive 500 miles to and fro to have a clean
place to show him how I fit and how we all fit within
a bigger context that's not manmade. It's natural.
It's made from the spirit, from God, and you don't
find that in the city. Everything you experience in
the city is manmade or most of it, and so we get the
idea, well, we can make it; we can break it; we can do
anything we want to, but it's all right. But that's
not the case when you get out into the natural
environment. You learn you're a part of an
interdependent net.
So that's the frame of reference we have,
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and this river is really a delightful experience.
We've just acquired eight canoes, and we start our
canoe trips from Bladensburg right here. I'm sorry if
you can't see this. The District line is running
right along here. So you see most of the Anacostia
River is in the District, but there's two miles that's
in Maryland, and we take kids and put them in canoes,
not only kids; big kids, too; put them in canoes here
and we go down the river, and you can go all the way
down to Benning Road and not see a single manmade
structure. It's an incredibly beautiful trip.
There's more bird wildlife in this area
than any other part of Washington, and this is the
Aquatic Gardens here where the Corps just spent what
was it, $2 million restoring weapons here? And
they're going to do some more work in Kingman Lake.
It's a super area here for doing what I said, bringing
young people to teach them there's something bigger to
life than a Chevrolet.
(Laughter.)
MR. BOONE: There's something more to life
than a parking lot or housing, you know, and this is
going to be an excellent place to do that.
If you have a group and you want to do
this, take them down the river, get in contact with me
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and we'll set it up.
And there's the National Arboretum. It's
our nation's garden spot. There are some incredibly
— you know, there are some plants in there that cost
more than my car did. They've imported them from
China. There's an Asia valley that comes right down
at the Anacostia River. It's incredibly beautiful
there.
And then you go down to Children's Island.
Children's Island has been a sore point. That's the
reason we have it in red here. Fifty acres of prime
property right in the middle of Washington, D.C., and
what does the present administration want to do with
it? They want to give it to a developer, charge $12
a head to go and look at these phoney crystal palace,
look at fish in aquarium, and other just really low
class events on Children's Island.
We would like to have Children's Island as
a nature center, a free park, preserve it like C&O
Canal is, like Rock Creek Park. That was the original
intent of the designers of this city. Rock Creek Park
was an upland park, and Anacostia was going to be an
aquatic park. We want to see that vision become a
reality, and that's what we're about.
We are fighting real hard now. The mayor
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wants to put the Barney Circle Freeway that's going to
go right through here, both sides of the river, and
hook up this Kenilworth with Southeast-Southwest. She
wants to develop Children's Island. This is her jobs
program. She wants to break up the furniture and burn
it to stay warm.
(Laughter.)
MR. BOONE: We're selling the next
generation's inheritance for a few lousy, low class
jobs in a construction that, you know, maybe last two
years. Nobody's going to buy a house with that kind
of job, but if you preserve this land we and the next
generations will have a beautiful place to enjoy,
equally as fine as anything else in this city.
And, in fact, this region right here is
going to be one of the most attractive nature areas in
the whole entire Eastern Seaboard. You've got a
beautiful urban area with the national Mall here, this
area here, and Fort Meade up here. That's a 20 mile
bike ride from the Mall to Fort Meade, and it's just
going to be a really delightful place to live and to
see nature not far from home.
So I highly encourage this group to offer
this experience to more people who live in this area
because this is the place we learn what's going on in
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our neighborhood. We're not learning from the
government. We're not learning from TV.
We had these clean-ups, as you saw. The
media doesn't come out for that. Although it's
dumping in the community, it's not very exciting.
We've had more than 80 of these clean-ups involving
thousands of volunteers, but you don't hear about it
in the paper.
But we're not doing it to get in the paper,
but it's important that it gets in the paper because
it gets into people's minds, and you know, coming over
here today, Alabama Avenue, the litter strewn on the
sides of the streets. It just gave me a creepy
feeling. It's an indicator of community pride, and
it's time. You know, it's time to organize and say,
"We can no longer tolerate this."
You know, the Kingman Park community, we
work in the Kingman Park community real closely, and
do you know what? We work together, and Jack Kent
Cook ain't there anymore. The new stadium isn't
happening there, and the reason that's not happening,
the Kingman Park community and environmental groups
got together. We put our color aside. We put all of
this other stuff aside, and we got down to this, and
we educated the people in the community, even some of
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them who had season's tickets. They came on our side
because we took the time to describe it to them and
tell them about the impacts of the new stadium, which
they already knew from the old stadium, and we got
together, and we blocked that stadium.
But it took everybody being informed, and
that's the reason I'm asking that these kinds of
meetings happen more often, because it's through these
kinds of information meetings that people learn the
truth about what's going on.
So that's what I've got to say and I thank
you for this opportunity.
(Applause.)
MS. JONES: Thank you. We thank you for
coming.
Our next speak is also a neighbor of mine,
a friend of mine, a long time friend of mine. I'm a
friend of her father's, okay, is Kemi Morten, Esquire;
is a Southeast Washington, D.C., resident who
graduated from the D.C. public schools before earning
a Bachelor's degree from the University of San
Francisco, and a law degree from the University of
California at Berkeley.
And I'd like to say this because I like to
give a lot of encouragement to women lawyers who
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understand what the issues are, and not that the men
don't understand the issues, but they understand them
from another point of view.
(Laughter.)
MS. JONES: What I'm saying is — what I'm
saying is, having been an advocate for the poor and in
the low income community and also part of that and a
former public housing tenant, we didn't make any
progress until we had some women lawyers who said,
"Well, I know about raising children."
The men were saying the same thing, but
they were saying something else about raising
children, and we were talking about nurturing children
in the environment, in a clean environment, and we
were saying things like that. So finally the men did
come to our side.
I must give some credit to Reverend
Lipscomb because no matter what we asked him to do —
he's the pastor of this church — what we asked him to
do when this was a little, bitty historical church
sitting on this site, he came to help us. Even if he
didn't agree with us, he came to help us, and
sometimes he put us on the right track, and we put him
on the right track.
(Laughter.)
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MS. JONES: So I am saying that I give a
lot of encouragement, lots and lots of encouragement
to anybody, but I do put some emphasis on young black
women lawyers and Kemi Morten is one of those, and
she's one of our own from here in Anacostia, and I
give you Kemi Morten.
(Applause.)
MS. MORTEN: Thank you. Good afternoon,
family.
I'll tell you I'm very, very pleased to
have been invited to speak today, and I really wish
that we could go around before this is over and just
find out who's here because I know everyone in this
room has a lot to say about this issue, and I think we
should meet next month, same time and same place.
(Laughter.)
MS. MORTEN: Or you can meet in our place.
We can rotate it.
I'm with the Ward 8 Citizens for
Environmental Justice, and I just wanted to ask: how
many of you know about the plans by the FAA to build
a 90 foot, 95 foot tall radar tower at the corner of
South Capitol and Martin Luther King? Please raise
your hands.
Okay. Ninety-five feet tall where it's
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going to have a facilities building. It's going to
have a huge underground fuel tank, and it's going to
be located on parkland that has been used for years in
this community by the neighbors. We would play
softball. Theresa, I know you know we'd have picnics
over there. I think it's I'd say about eight or nine
acres of parkland, beautiful parkland in the middle of
a residential community.
I found out about it because Unfoldment,
which is the organization that I work with, is
situated right next door to the site. We have three
acres of land, and our neighbors, the U.S. Park
Service, have nine, and they're reluctant conspirators
in this, I must say, co-conspirators. I think they're
kind of being forced along by the politics, but they
really don't want the tower to be there.
When I saw the scaffolding going up two
months ago to actually construct it, I mean I just
freaked out, and I called our ANC commissioner, Calvin
Lockridge and Mary Cochran and some others, and they
sprang right into action, and we called the meeting of
Unfoldment. I showed them the scaffolding. We formed
the Ward 8 Citizens for Environmental Justice, and our
membership is open. You can call us at (202) 561-
2992, (202) 561-2992. We've only had one meeting, but
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that was a powerful meeting because we called
Congresswoman Norton's office, and she came to our
meeting. Well, she didn't come, but she sent Alma
Henderson, and we named our group. We created our
letterhead. We came up with a phone number and a fax
number, and that's all we've done. We don't even have
a mission statement, and one week later the
scaffolding came down. Isn't that great?
(Applause.)
MS. MORTEN: But that's not the end of it
because what they're going to do — I've gotten a
letter dated May 20th to Ms. Norton, a copy of a
letter — the Federal Aviation Administration proposes
to locate an airport surveillance Radar 9 tower in the
vicinity of South Capitol Street and Martin Luther
King, and they're going to have another hearing within
the next 60 days.
Now, the problem is they had a hearing on
October 10th, 1992, and February 5th, 1994, but nobody
knew about it. We only received less than a week's
notice of the February 5th, '94, meeting, and I don't
think any of us received notice of the October 10th,
and at the hearing we weren't given any information
about the structure. We were just told that it was
coming.
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And there are other sites that are more
appropriate for this tower. It's presently at Crystal
City, and they're saying that the buildings are too
tall at Crystal City, and Crystal City has overgrown
this tower, and so it's going to have to be moved, but
it could be put at Bolling Air Force Base. It could
be put at National Airport. There are a whole lot of
places it could be put rather than the heart of our
residential community, taking away parkland from our
children.
So I am here on behalf of the Ward 8
Citizens for Environmental Justice to urge all of you
to join our organization and to help us defeat this
permanently.
Now, the Washington Post people came out
last week, and sometimes, you know, when you get a
call from the Washington Post — and I know you know
it, Theresa — sometimes you don't even want to return
the call because you don't know what the story is
going to wind up saying.
(Laughter.)
MS. MORTEN: And when I took them over to
the site, we had to hike through the woods to show the
reporter the site, and he said, "Well, could you hike
through the woods again and show the photographer and
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take a picture, maybe preferably of little children
who would be deprived of this area?"
Well, the woods have grown up now and you
can't even use the area for a park anymore unless it's
cleared, but we hiked through the second time, and we
took pictures, and there's going to be an article they
said coming out, but none of that really means
anything, except as a lawyer I have volunteered, as I
told the Washington Post reporter, to file a lawsuit
and to get a team of lawyers together to help us file
a lawsuit if necessary to prevent the construction of
this radar tower in our community.
But we're going to need your help, and I
think we don't even have to go as far as a lawsuit if
we get all of your help in this room to make calls and
come to the meeting and get involved with us. I think
we as a people can defeat this outside of the courts.
So I'm here to ask for your help and to ask you to
join our organization and give us your genius and your
ideas and let's get this tower out of our community.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
MS. JONES: Thank you, Kemi.
And as far as the tower is concerned, I
wrote a letter, and I told them that we'd walk in
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front of bulldozers, and I don't know whether you'd
like to do that.
MS. MORTEN: That's right. That's right.
MS. JONES: I've done that before.
MS. MORTEN: We will walk in front of
bulldozers.
MS. JONES: Because the tower is not what
we want. We want that to be an environment where
children are nurtured, as I said before. That's the
way I think children ought to be.
I'd like to thank our panel. I thought you
were great. I think everybody in this room is great,
and this is the end of this section of the program.
(Whereupon, a short recess was taken.)
REV. CHAMBERS: I'm going to be very short.
I'm serving for Brenda Richardson's
absence, but the concerns I have this afternoon are as
a result of going into a meeting focus group at the
museum that dealt with environment. As a clergy
person in Ward 8, I find myself to be one of those
persons who are speaking up who really had no
awareness of the toxic dumps, the waste, the quality
of air that was in Ward 8. After sitting, listening
to the meeting, I became very concerned because I
think all clergy persons are concerned about the
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welfare of the parishioners, residents.
One of the things that I'm going to offer
this afternoon at the table is that this should be a
consortium of groups in Ward 8 primarily that deal
with environment issues. It appears that a lot of
people are doing a lot of things, but we're all out on
various wings, and I think that one of the answers to
that is to bring a consortium together that not only
would bring about an umbrella group, but also bring
about an advocacy group.
There would be no need for the citizens of
Ward 8 — and there is a need, but had there existed
a consortium which would have been on target, then the
emergency need for this citizens group — the group
would have been in place, and what I'm suggesting in
Ward 8 is that we come together and bring all of the
pieces together because what I understand as the
clergy here is that not only are we talking about
environment issues, but we're also talking about a
great development that's getting ready to hit
Anacostia.
And I think that many of us are asleep.
Many of us don't understand that the Metro is there
for great development, that the Highland Washington
Heights Apartments are there, and there's a group
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meeting constantly for the purposes of developing that
whole piece and doing away with the public housing and
everything else in that environment.
So I think we really need a group that will
be involved in ongoing, day-by-day activity in terms
of dealing with the issues that are hitting us in Ward
8, and that group must be a group that's totally
staffed, funded, executive director, because I
personally feel that if that does not happen, we're
revisiting Southwest; we're revisiting Georgetown.
The other that I offer, after listening to
the discussion, is that in public housing that is set
up having focus groups and museums, that maybe we want
to go into public housing and meet with the people
right where they are and make them aware. Begin the
education piece with them right in their setting.
PARTICIPANT: Amen.
(Applause.)
REV. CHAMBERS: We sit in this room today,
and I'm sure all of you are experts, most of you, most
of you.
(Laughter.)
REV. CHAMBERS: But I'm sure that the folk
who are in the public housing environment, many of
them aren't aware. They know nothing about the
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quality of air, the toxic waste. I did not know until
three weeks ago when I went to CVS — is that right?
PARTICIPANTS: Yes.
REV. CHAMBERS : Drug Store. I did not know
that God's toxic dump was behind the drug store.
People are shopping there every day. I did not know
that. I wasn't aware of that.
So I think what we need to do in order to
help the people is to go into the environment and then
to impact it. I would like to see us in Ward 8, maybe
out of this consortium, begin a clean-up process,
begin to move automobiles, clean the environment, and
even in public schools. You know, kids go into dirty
schools, then they go to dirty homes, then they go to
dirty streets. So if we're going to really impact
this situation, I would hope that we would start in
our neighborhoods beginning to clean up the streets,
bringing to bear on the Honorable, most distinguished
former mayor, Mr. Barry, that we need to do something
in Ward 8 and clean this total environment.
And then the other idea is relevant to
churches and pastors. I don't know, Reverend Motley.
You've done an excellent job, and I'm sure pastors
were invited today. Possibly ten, 15 pastors were
invited today. I'm not sure that they see this piece
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as critical, and it's due primarily to, again, the
lack of education.
But I think that a means, a method, some
mobilization can come about to bring about pastoral
involvement. There's hope. There's got to be hope,
and I think that once they understand this through an
education piece that they would participate.
The reason I'm here today is because I
understood in the focus group the danger, the need,
and so I came. I'm sure that other pastors really
have a real feeling for this, especially in Ward 8,
those I speak of, that they will join us at the table.
So don't give up. I just think we need to find a
model, find a means, find an organization to bring
them to the table and give to them the same education
and we received today.
I know that that can happen. The final
piece that I bring to the table, Mr. Banks spoke of
the dumping, the illegal dumping in Anacostia. That
needs to be addressed in an immediate way, and I think
that that can happen possibly through some
mobilization, some monitoring of your organizations,
your groups that will set up a reporting system, and
we can identify these people who are coming in, have
a system by which we can report them, and make them be
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held accountable for their actions.
Those are the items that I deduce from this
meeting today, and I trust that it will be helpful,
and maybe we can put them in place.
(Applause.)
(Whereupon, at 2:50 p.m., the meeting was
concluded.)
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COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS
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CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that the foregoing transcript
in the matter of: ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND CONCERNS
EAST OF THE ANACOSTIA RIVER:
JUSTICE OR JUST US?
Before: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Date: JUNE 18, 1994
Place: WASHINGTON, D.C.
represents the full and complete proceedings of the
aforementioned matter, as reported and reduced to type¬
writing.
NEAL R. GROSS
COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS
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>N
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